Sleep - Hempispheres (CD)

As the genre-defying masters of stoner metal, the latest iteration of Sleep finds founding member and lead songwriter Al Cisneros newly partnered with the generational talent of Dale Crover (Melvins, Redd Kross) on drums and the iconoclastic Bubba Dupree (Void) on guitar. While simpler minds may seek out the redundancy of a monotonous iterative exercise, the road map of new album Hempispheres is an exploratory vision, one replacing overload with nuance and subtlety yet maintaining the interplay that made the band so special from the outset. So while the whiners on messageboards and comment sections bemoan the amicable absence of long-time guitarist Matt Pike, real heads, visionaries and open-minded truth-seekers alike will be rewarded with not the Sleep album they anticipated or expected, rather with Hempispheres being the album that is needed.