Al Cisneros surely knew the scrutiny he would attract by resurrecting Sleep without its founding guitarist, Matt Pike. If the monkish Cisneros was the earthly celebrant at the center of classics like Dopesmoker and Sleep’s Holy Mountain, then Pike was the vengeful deity he summoned, a shimmering being of pure, earthshaking volume. His guitar tone was a perpetually overdriven combination of crunch and fuzz that never sacrificed clarity for heaviness, and his riffs, nuanced without being overcomplicated, were the fundamental building blocks of Sleep’s songs. Pike is gone now, a casualty of either Cisneros’s intractability or his own, and Bubba Dupree from the D.C. hardcore punk band Void is here in his place. Even if he wasn’t trying to fill such enormous shoes, he sounds like a poor fit on Hempispheres, a tedious, tepid attempt to revitalize the Sleep formula with none of the ecstatic power of their best work.
It’s not that Dupree is incapable. In Void, he bent two-minute punk songs around his chaotic guitar work, wielding noise and feedback just as nimbly as melody. Dupree’s tone isn’t the jet-engine roar that Pike’s was (and still is in High on Fire), but he’s an innovative player in his own right, and the idea of a Sleep built around his style is at least an intriguing one. The problem on Hempispheres is that he’s so deferential to Cisneros as to be nearly invisible. The riffs he does play are simplistic, frequently mixed lower than Cisneros’ bass and vocals, and seldom memorable. His solos, like the snaking one that dominates the back half of the title track, fare somewhat better, but they still sound too timid, like he’s afraid to play something that would refocus the song away from the bass groove.
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That might be less of a problem if Cisneros didn’t sound so uninspired. The five shortish songs on Hempispheres—as vivid an illustration of the terrible food/small portions paradox as there’s been in recent metal history—are all based on plodding bass lines and monotone vocal parts that sound basically interchangeable. Dupree sneaks in his probing licks where he can, and Melvins drummer Dale Crover, also making his Sleep debut, tries his best to inject some liveliness and swing into the staid proceedings. (Crover’s admirably Bill Ward-like playing on “Whole Wheat Mountain / Well Baked” is the album’s one true silver lining.) But it’s an uphill battle. It’s tempting to say Cisneros should have released Hempispheres as an Om album, but where that band strives for spiritual transcendence through doomy drones, this version of Sleep manages only to sound rudderless and aloof. It’s also difficult to attain a Zen state when there’s a 52-year-old man giggling a constant stream of weed puns in your ear.
Stoner doom lyrical conventions can be tough sledding in the best of circumstances, but the half-assed sci-fi story of Hempispheres is about as bad as it gets. Here are just a few choice vocab words from this latest edition of the Cisneros dictionary: “Rosinante” (like the Rocinante, from Rush’s “Cygnus X-1”); “Dagobud” (like Dagobah, from Star Wars); “Iommicist” (like Tony Iommi); “hashteroid”; “flarespliff.” Dopesmoker had plenty of stupid lines about marijuana and amp worship, too, but it backed them up with some of the heaviest riffs known to man and delivered them in a throat-burning growl. On Hempispheres, you can understand Cisneros far too clearly for the quality of his lyrics, and the music too often feels like an afterthought, like Cisneros took his prized notebook of weed jokes and scrounged around for leftover songs to fit them. And yet, Cisneros seems to think this stuff is in conversation with the greats. Iommi’s name is invoked repeatedly in the lyrical lore, and the album title is a pun on Rush’s most progressive record. Cisneros started name-checking his heroes in Sleep lyrics on 2018’s The Sciences, but on that record, the music could mostly withstand the comparisons. There is nothing of Tony Iommi’s razorlike precision or Geddy Lee’s inventiveness on Hempispheres. There’s just a guy with a bong who sounds like he should probably put it down.
