there’s not many people who can enjoy my kind of short walk home from oxford street, i mused somewhat smugly last night as i stalked the heady fifteen minutes, through back streets, past monuments and landmarks to my front door near the river; its a beautiful journey full of stories and photo opportunities at every turn.
and then last night a chance meeting too.
i saw an old friend; a tall, familiar blond wending his way through soho – we stopped to say hi and catch up. he introduced me to his companions who were on their way to xfm to record a session.
i did have a wee bit of a fangirl moment when kevin (worthy of fandom in his own right as former seafood bassist, and now of the noisy feral explosion that is pre) told me his running crew were sleeping states. i’d found their stuff on stereogum way back last year and was sure so i’d posted this track before it was going to make my ‘best of hl’ list. a trawl of our old server seems to hint that i hadn’t (which is nice since i can be sure that i’m posting stuff now which would make that retrospective best of… even if my mind’s not as solid as i’d hoped).
with an album out on tome next week now seems a perfect time to mention sleeping states (particularly since i didn’t last time).
laconic, melodic and none too soporific, with melodies which seep under your covers and set you dreaming, markland starkie’s voice is easy like he’s talking, and soft like he’s whispering. layering instrumental blankets at different times with just vocals or a programmed drum machine beat or radio hiss or just a guitar, he achieves that difficult unaffected-disaffected englishness which is often enough to make me change channels and just listen to hip hop for three weeks solid.
there are elements of (fellow warwickshire lad) nick drake or the guillemots, talking heads or nick lowe in the stuff i’ve heard but what’s so great about sleeping states is that it is elemental, sort of like alchemy, and the sum of the parts don’t sound anything like the bits they’re assembled from.
while their session isn’t on the xfm site just yet (which sadly i couldn’t listen to last night as there was a mac issue at hand) sleeping states have been getting some serious blog & press love and are off on a us tour later this month (as are pre who you should absolutely check out too), in the meantime buy the album from tome, listen to this and drift away.