AEM068 Day Sleeper

Day Sleeper is a band com­prised pri­mar­ily of col­lege sopho­mores but they have a remark­ably long his­tory. Cas Kaplan (gui­tar, vocals) has been gig­ging since age eleven and began writ­ing songs under the moniker Day Sleeper at age twelve. Kaplan finds it impor­tant to clar­ify that Day Sleeper is not a nod to the REM hit of the same name. Actu­ally it is a ref­er­ence to Insom­nia, Kaplan’s for­mer punk band, whose rejected mate­r­ial became Day Sleeper’s early reper­toire. Even­tu­ally Day Sleeper grew into a band with the addi­tion of gui­tarist Justin Dan­forth, bassist Dan Ferm, and drum­mer Luke Pyen­son. They recorded their first album Drop Your Sword in 2008, while attend­ing high school in New­ton, MA and released it the fol­low­ing year through Cool­ing Pie Records, home to KC Quilty among oth­ers. Kaplan jokes that, “the album was well received, espe­cially inter­na­tion­ally, where oddly enough more Chi­nese web­sites have writ­ten about it than ones from any other coun­try.” At any rate, I think it’s due time that Day Sleeper got a lit­tle love from the press back home and although I’m cur­rently writ­ing from a cafe in Seoul—really it’s just a minor technicality—I hope that this review will at long last intro­duce them to an Amer­i­can audience.

Kaplan explains that A-side “Win­dows Left Open” was orig­i­nally called “Sum­mer­time” and “in one sense is meant to evoke the breezi­ness of that time of year.” Per­haps it does, although I cant help but won­der what that breeze car­ries. Kaplan asserts that there’s some­thing “cyn­i­cal and sin­is­ter” about it and I agree that the song is alto­gether unset­tling. A dis­tant rum­ble of thun­der and the faint of rain are swept through that open win­dow and pol­lute the sum­mer after­noon with a fore­bod­ing drea­ri­ness. Actu­ally, “Win­dows Left Open” is a fit­ting sin­gle for a band called Day Sleeper. A lum­ber­ing 6/8 pulse and lack of har­monic res­o­lu­tion cre­ate a dreamy vibe. It’s a lit­tle like the feel­ing you get when you acci­den­tally drift off in the mid after­noon and wake up drenched in a cool sweat, only to find that hours have passed and its already dark out. It always takes a few min­utes to fig­ure out what hap­pened, to remem­ber where you are and even who you are. Actu­ally, it reminds me of a pas­sage from Swann’s Way in which Proust describes the sen­sa­tion he felt as a child upon wak­ing up. This return to real­ity “did not shock my rea­son but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from real­iz­ing that the can­dle­stick was no longer lit… I recov­ered my sight and I was amazed to find a dark­ness around me soft and rest­ful for my eyes, but per­haps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing with out cause, incom­pre­hen­si­ble, a thing truly dark.”

I real­ize that I’m tread­ing on thin ice with that ref­er­ence. Day Sleeper is not a pre­ten­tious hip­ster band and I don’t think the com­par­i­son to Proust is one that they them­selves would draw. But whether or not they’d acknowl­edge it, their music evokes some of the same sen­sa­tions. It takes me to a spe­cial place where the bound­aries between dream, mem­ory, and real­ity are blurred. A drugged-out lo-fi aes­thetic rem­i­nis­cent of Pave­ment is inter­spersed with brief moments of clar­ity. In this case, the pas­sage “what have I left to say…” in which the band breaks into a con­ven­tional three chord pat­tern feels like a cho­rus even though it only hap­pens once and inter­rupts the dis­con­cert­ing monot­ony of the groove. Kaplan explains that “Win­dows Left Open” is indica­tive of Day Sleeper’s cur­rent artis­tic direc­tion. “The gui­tars are tan­gled, the bass is lead­ing, the drums are groovy and com­bat­ive, and the vocals are melodic.” He also cites an empha­sis on con­ci­sion, which as a break from the bands “shoegaz­ing” past. “Win­dows Left Open” retains the washed out gui­tars and emo­tional restraint char­ac­ter­is­tic of shoegaze, but Kaplan’s melodic vocal line is too dis­tinct and the song’s form far too com­pact to fit the arche­typal shoegaze blueprint.

B-side “Hid­ing Place” is sim­i­larly dreamy. I’d attribute that mostly to the vocals which sound sus­pi­ciously as if they were recorded under water. Good luck mak­ing out a word the band is say­ing. Here the human voice is used for its melodic qual­i­ties rather than as an instru­ment for speech. And yet the gar­bled words give the song a sort of haunt­ing qual­ity, as if there is some impor­tant mes­sage to be con­veyed but it’s lost in trans­mis­sion. I should clar­ify that this record­ing is only a demo and that it was recorded in a dor­mi­tory. Although it’s hard to imag­ine now, in later incar­na­tions the song will fea­ture a promi­nent drum part. Kaplan explains, “I wish there was a ver­sion that had Luke’s play­ing on it, because he really steals the show on this one live.” But even with­out drums, a strong pulse can be felt. Ferm’s propul­sive bass vamp strongly marks the down­beat and gives the song a sense of for­ward momen­tum. Day Sleeper isn’t exactly the kind of band to make me get up and dance but they insist that they really love it when peo­ple get into their music at shows. In effort to get the crowd mov­ing, “I tried to give this one a lit­tle bounce and snap,” explains Kaplan. Nev­er­the­less, the pre­dom­i­nant “gui­tar phi­los­o­phy” remains the same as in other Day Sleeper songs. Prin­ci­pally, the gui­tars “weave and dove­tail around one another” and move sep­a­rately from sec­tion to sec­tion, pay­ing lit­tle regard to the whole “verse-chorus-verse thing.” And so, “Hid­ing Place” strikes an inter­est­ing bal­ance. It’s more groove ori­ented than most of Day Sleeper’s mate­r­ial but it’s so locked in that it becomes predictable.

What’s next for Day Sleeper? They’ve got some major plans. They hope to under­take the record­ing of a new album in the near future and to fol­low it up with a national tour. In the mean time they’re releas­ing a stop­gap EP called Won­der­land Kid fea­tur­ing songs recorded at WERS at Emer­son Col­lege in Boston, includ­ing A-side “Win­dows Left Open”. Day Sleeper has always been an active live band, play­ing at venues rang­ing in size from the cramped 75-person base­ment of the Knit­ting Fac­tory in NYC to Boston music strong­hold TT The Bear’s Place. If you check out their MySpace page you’ll notice that they pitch them­selves as a BOS/NYC/CT/MTL band. Most high school bands fall apart after their mem­bers are scat­tered across the coun­try by the col­lege admis­sion gods but Day Sleeper has man­aged to make the tran­si­tion from a single-city high school band to a quad-city col­lege band with remark­able grace. They’ve been gig­ging across the full extent of their geo­graphic range and intend to con­tinue per­form­ing as fre­quently as their sched­ules will allow. Com­ing soon to a venue near you…mark your calendars!

Nate Green­berg

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