With their first album of new studio material in twenty or so years, the stoner metal legends of Sleep step up to the heavy expectations of their fans with aplomb, picking up smoothly from their exit on Dopesmoker / Jerusalem despite a change of drummers for the three-piece.  Expansive riffs, craggy bass-lines, singing with a tinge of growling, and lavish lead guitar work are par for the course, with the band pulling a couple of tracks (i.e., “Sonic Titan” and “Antarcticans Thawed”) out of their live-only purgatory and into vibrant presentation.

It’s difficult to gauge how much influence the scores of imitators and emulators of Sleep in the band’s decades of hiatus have had on the shaping of their return material, but (discounting Dopesmoker and its lone hour-long song), the songs are longer on average than on the group’s previous albums, with three of its six tracks topping ten minutes (in comparison to one on Sleep’s Holy Mountain, and none on Volume One).  And while a large part of those lengthy songs does consist of circling around a main riff for what feels like minutes on end, it also seems that the work put in by the musicians in other groups and solo efforts during Sleep’s down-time has helped inform their sense of how to grow those riffs while keeping them controlled.

The time rift also puts an odd spin on the flavor of the songs, with their broad bass strokes and buzz-sweeping guitar-work riding an edge between blueprint and parody of the stoner metal style.  It’s hard to escape the self-conscious vibes (especially with a song titled after Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, “Giza Butler”), but the largely instrumental nature of the songs helps tamp down the weirdness of that impact on the music itself.  Taken on their own, they’re also well-written, atmospheric, and suitably energized, and while it’s not a giant leap forward for the band, the demonstration that they can still meet the bar set by their past work is an incredibly welcome one.

Here’s the alternate cover art.