Review of Sleeping Pills [12k1054]

Musique Machine (.COM)

Sleeping Pills offers up nine wonderfullly focused & often emotional felt guitar based tracks of: post-rock ambience, emotive blues tinged guitar scapes & harmonic yet melancholy tinged drifts. This is the first release from this German based project that centres around guitarist & mood-maker René Margraff.

The main focus and centre of all of the tracks here is a Fender Jazzmaster guitar to which is added subtle traces of synth glow & minimal field recording matter. Each track here unfolds in such a slow, dreamy and often melancholy tinged manner. Yet it’s never gets too dark or gloomy in it’s flow, with often rich harmonic trails appearing in the often simply looped guitar patterns, which are delivered with great emotional understanding & care. Unlike some of the guitar ambient works that have appeared on the 12k label- Pilllodiver’s sound is left untouched by electronics or post production; meaning it has a very honest & organic feel to it’s unfold & drift, so you can really imagine most of the time a guitarist with a simply set-up playing his heart out in the connor of your listening space.

So Sleeping Pills is sonically simple yet emotional rich & atmospherically touched collection of guitar pieces which drifts somewhere between: ambience, slowed post- rock drifts, melodic & woozy indie rock. Really it’s a great début album & another great release on the always consistent 12k label.

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