Sleeper

The sounds and scenarios on Carmen Villain’s debut album, *Sleeper*, are enough to jar you awake and make your head swim. Villain seems far more interested in peeling back the layers of her troubled psyche than reveling in beautiful surfaces. On *Sleeper*, she walks through dense sonic atmospheres that bring to mind The Sun City Girls’ bracing clatter and This Heat’s ominous constructions. Her lyrics convey a sense of fear, desire, and dislocation that’s both seductive and disturbing. “Lifeissin” sets the album\'s tone as Villain caresses her venom-etched words against severe synths and tingling percussion. “Dreamo” and “Easy” are even scarier, bathing their eerie transgressions in metallic echoes and quivers. At the furthest extreme is “Made a Shell,” a lysergic interior journey embellished with swirling vocals and squalling guitars. Villain shifts to upbeat (though still abrasive) pop for “Kingwoman” and ends on a morbidly erotic note with “Demon Lover.” With production input from Emil Nikolaisan (Serena Maneesh) and Prins Thomas, *Sleeper* is a sustained aural hallucination by a true mistress of dangerous dreams.

Once a model who appeared on the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire, the singer's debut is the first music she's ever shared with the world, having written in private for years. Sleeper evokes the seedy prowl of Royal Trux and early Sonic Youth, and has a disaffected air.

The involvement of Prins Thomas, Serena Maneesh's Emil Nikolaisen, and the largely electronic imprint Smalltown Supersound in a set of songs by a former Vogue model suggests any number of musical directions, yet Carmen Villain's debut Sleeper defies almost any expectations listeners might have.