I like sleeping. That feeling when you wake up and you don’t really know what time it is, or it’s much brighter than you expect is a wondrous thing. And that feeling (or is this just me) when you squeeze your fists together in the morning and they feel really weak. Is that only me? Ok….
For London group The Joys of Sleeping aka Sam and Dave (yeah, I know – I did well not to make the cheap joke, right?) , it’s all about homesickness. For Sam, Moving from New York as a teenager to rural England (Winchester), and then on to London. For both of them, it’s about studying and working odd jobs, Sam’s in a hotel desk on the night shift. He should well know about the Joys of Sleeping. The boys have known each other since school though, bonding over a Foals t-shirt (who wouldn’t) and having an actual fight at one point.
The boys have recorded a couple of tracks, Dude York Part One, and (maybe unsurprisingly) Dude York Part Two. Part one opens blurry eyed, with this general hue over it, layered with guitars, while the vocal almost takes a backseat. The track builds, adding various percussion and more insistent guitar to its climax.
Part two is slightly more introspective, the guitar taking on these more intricate figures while fragments of tune are played by glockenspiel that give the music this child-like quality. Shortly after the vocal kicks in, so does the band, and it becomes this rather charming pop song, with these layers and patterns accompanying it.
The end result, as the boys say themselves, is somewhere between reality and dreaming. Certainly both tracks are dreamy and have this sort of memorable almost droney undertone. Is it between reality and dreaming? I’ve got two children under the age of eight. What on earth do I know about sleep?
Soundcloud: /joysofsleeping
Twitter: @JoysofSleeping
http://thejoysofsleeping.tumblr.com/
