It's quite rare for an artist to come along, straight out of the blue and sweep me off my feet. My parameters for truly rapturous musical experiences are so elusively specific, at times contradictory, and so lofty that any special occurrences are almost a laughable conspiracy theory. Like a theorist's elaborate shill - proposing that the government's complicity with an alien hierarchy in producing growth hormones to make everyone fat and useless, so the country will be easier to take over, setting in motion their plans to dominate the world, then using said fat people in a sort of "Fat Gladiator Games", watching participants die of heart attacks and go into diabetic shock before they can even reach their opponents in battle - the idea of amazing music to bottle-rocket straight into my heart is just as ridiculous.
But when it does happen - oh man - it's like that rocket hit a snow-packed mountain and the ensuing avalanche is my adoration - tumbling down, destroying all the cabins and snowboarders of doubt in it's path. Such an avalanche occurred when I listened to the cacophonous ghost that is Sleep Over's debut, Forever. The brainchild behind such a plume of mystifying ecstasy is Stephanie Franciotti, based out of good old Austin, Texas. Franciotti floods her music unapologetically in reverb, then throws on a shawl of decayed recording quality to push it all down into the mists of the subconscience.
The entire affair is traversing the anatomy of a ghost - a once vibrant network of memories, blood, veins and organs - now a teal, rear-projected transparency in the mind's eye. The opening to the album, "Behind Closed Doors", has a similar cadence to the beginning of the Cocteau Twin's Victorialand, though instead of guitars and saxophone rising out of the ether, it is synthesizers and electronic ambience. It's an amorphous wash that pours you through the finger tips, promising greater things within. And you only have to wait about three seconds for that greater-ness. "Romantic Streams" is a gorgeous and sultry piece of music, automatically dissipating anxieties and beckoning you to come hither, lay down your head and bask in the warmth of intimacy. The recurring shower of regurgitated '80s synthesizer, trickling over distant explosions of the drum machine strikes that perfect balance between sweet and heavy.
"The Heavens Turn by Themselves" is all epic business. It is, without a doubt, the album's deep white heart and I imagine the fact it comes in the middle of proceedings is no coincidence. Franciotti delivers a satin rush of moans and croons, the words completely obscured by dark-hall reverb and delay constantly folding in on itself. The huge ambient chords rise tall like shafts of light, while a horn synth wavers between the same three notes throughout.
But this spectral corpse isn't all transcendental haze. Franciotti is sure to temper any over-saturation of sugar with a dose of darkness - namely the use of abstract structure and noise. For example, "Cryingame" grinds in with distortion and loose synth pulsations that create a miniature tornado in the gut. There's certainly a foreboding and a sense of doubt, but it also carries the outlines of curiosity more than dread.
Of course, wherever the darkness comes on the album, the light is never too far behind. In a way, Forever accurately describes melancholy, with all the happiness distressed into despair and back again and forth again and back, the fluctuations in mood are so well timed that you'll wonder why this woman didn't turn out to be a psychologist. This is the type of album that makes all my searching worthwhile. It's music that speaks directly to my unfettered genesis, affirming all the emotions but remembering to fill in the details of perspective. It's a phantom body that I am sure to return to many times and pay my dearest respects.
