Even In Arcadia
“Will you listen?” Sleep Token vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Vessel asks on “Look to Windward,” the opening track from the band’s fourth album. Once again, the masked British phenoms seamlessly blend genres as the song goes from *Kid A*-era Radiohead to modern R&B to cinematic strings to an explosive metal riff. By now, fans have come to expect these kinds of dramatic shifts from the anonymous group, but *Even in Arcadia* isn’t just more of the same. It’s an expansion, the widening of an already impressive palette. “Emergence” offers the gospel refrain “Go ahead and wrap your arms around me” before Vessel raps over a loop of a trilling guitar and then weaves in and out of a beefy nu metal riff. “Dangerous” is probably the closest Sleep Token has come to pure Deftones, a band they’ve referenced, sonically and melodically, on previous albums. “Past Self” takes a more straight-ahead R&B approach, but with a vocal melody that echoes back on itself to create a disorienting stereo effect. Melancholy single “Damocles” references classic Greek mythology and seems to address Vessel’s personal struggles with fame and staying anonymous: “Nobody told me I’d get tired of myself/When it all looks like heaven, but it feels like hell.” “Caramel” might have a similar theme (“Wear me out like Prada, devil in my detail,” Vessel sings), but does it with a syncopated xylophone rhythm that drops into another Chino Moreno-like vocal melody over a tsunami of distorted guitars and a purgative nu metal beatdown. “Provider” channels neo-soul master D’Angelo as Vessel manages to rhyme “ICU” with “I see you” before the full-metal bridge kicks in. Closer “Infinite Baths” unfurls like an extended meditation in the eye of the storm until the inevitable screaming metal barrage—the longest and most ferocious on the album—takes over. And then it fades into the shadows again, just like the band itself.
The masked, anonymous UK quartet might be the biggest metal band in a generation—yet the group’s laborious, watered-down fusion of pop, rap, and djent amounts to very little.
Spearheaded by the piano and some of Vessel’s most human lyrics to date, Sleep Token' fourth album seals their status as the overlords of their scene and generation
Sleep Token expand, blossom and occasionally get weird on ambitious fourth album, Even In Arcadia.
As their headline set at Download Festival edges closer, Sleep Token release their most heartfelt and experimental album yet with Even in Arcadia.
High achieving, chart-topping, grand creators of mystique, it is hard to think of pressing bucket list items for Sleep Token, significant accolades
It's exciting to see this sort of excitement for a band; it's been a while. SLEEP TOKEN's sudden rise has already been dissected and debated, only adding to the luster of the anonymous gentleman at the heart of it all, The Vessel. His seamless genre-hopping has already moved SLEEP TOKEN beyond stand...
Will Marshall reviews the fourth album by Sleep Token! Read his review of 'Even In Arcadia' here on Distorted Sound!
Sleep Token - Even in Arcadia review: double take on my cash flow (emotional)
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