by LE Francis
I’m writing this the morning after the show & this morning has a very full circle feel for me.
Several months ago I was in Seattle for a two show trip — Spiritbox & The Sound of Animals Fighting. I stayed in an identical hotel room in the same hotel I’m writing this from. & while I was up early writing the Spiritbox review, I got a presale notification for the Sleep Token show I’m writing about right now. Drinking the same disappointing hotel coffee, mildly hungover. Now I’m writing about Sleep Token while preparing to go out to see The Wonder Years tonight. & like Spiritbox the Sleep Token show was sold out & the venue was practically bursting at the seams.
But it’s easy to see why. Sleep Token is the kind of band that you go heart-first into. Their music is incredibly emotionally engaging & when it’s not that, it’s fun & unapologetically horny. & I expected the crowd last night to skew a little to the femme side (it did) & a little young (arguably) but what I didn’t expect was the relative chill of everyone when put into a fairly frustrating situation — a very sold out show in an unreasonably small room.
First of all, based on what I’ve read on Reddit & Twitter, The Showbox handled themselves really well. Every show on this tour sold out & there were reports of people standing in line well into the headlining set. I got to the venue about an hour before doors & was in a line that was already all the way around the block & onto 2nd Street. However the line moved fairly quickly after doors & because everyone seemed to want the pit, I pretty easily snagged a spot at the bar rail, stage right, close to where I was for The Sound of Animals Fighting.
The room pretty quickly filled up but I was lucky that where I was standing didn’t get bad until about the end of A.A. Williams’ set.
When I ran to the bathroom it took a bit of negotiation to get back to my jacket & drink but it wasn’t impossible. Do I think they oversold a smidge? Maybe. Was it so annoying it ruined the experience? Not at all.
A.A. Williams
This tour was my introduction to A.A. Williams whose haunting, emotional music feels something like Zeal & Ardor meets Chelsea Wolfe.
Her live show is captivating. Her mournful vocal lines are projected delicately atop a very tight & well-rehearsed band. The result has you leaning in to hear every detail you can possibly pick up.
& everything you see live translates really well in the studio. There’s a simplicity to the songwriting that lays the emotional nature of her lyrics, her vocal melodies bare. Stylistically, her music is very different but the poetry of her music & heavy potential for emotional damage reminds me of Holy Fawn. There is a gravity to the songwriting that engages you, puts you in an empathetic headspace & then when you read the lyrics you immediately feel into all the empty places in your own life where they may echo, resonate & you are filled with the grief of them.
Sleep Token
I could write a lot about Sleep Token, even if it’s just to refute the nerds on TikTok mad that they’re classified as metal or not classified as metal. Sleep Token is above all some weird dudes making weird music. They draw ire from genre-purity nerds because they shift effortlessly between.
& of course, whenever an act blows up, there’s also the people who think it’s cool to hate it. I used to be that guy when I was like 14 & it’s a bit boring. But if that’s you, go for it I guess.
Sleep Token’s songwriting prowess is impressive in a way that reminds me of a very different band, Portugal. The Man. But while Portugal always seems to have an overarching genre-mood to an album, Sleep Token will switch up sometimes several times within a song. The constant with these bands is that you’re going to hear a well composed song that sounds like them regardless of whatever genre they are currently flirting with. These are musicians who have mastered voice (I don’t mean vocals, but voice in a stylistic sense) in a way similar to great novelists.
I am a newer Sleep Token fan, brought in when The Summoning went viral. But the single that got me to listen through their whole discography was Aqua Regia. The basis of this column is that I’m a poet writing about music but I also write a lot of long & short-form paranormal romance & when Aqua Regia hit I was editing a manuscript where the antagonist happened to be an ancient alchemist. Once I realized their discography was the perfect accompaniment to my story it was over.
There is nothing I can say about their live show that hasn’t been said thousands of times over – they are astoundingly good, they lean into the mythos of their music, give a unique but sonically tight performance, & still manage to engage & interact with the crowd.
I was on III’s side of the stage & while I’ll default watch the bassist at any live show, as it’s the instrument I play, I hardly noticed what or how he was playing because both him & Vessel were all over the place, dancing, gesturing, riling the crowd. Somehow you knew he was ordering you to sing along even though his face was covered by a mask & they do not speak or banter between songs. All is done in gestures & pre-recorded conversations played between songs.
They have a frantic, incredibly odd energy that just pulls you in. I suppose in a way the weirdness of it all makes sharing such devastating emotion more human & less humiliating. If you’re going to cry along to songs about longing & damage & the spiritual toll of it all, it’s probably better if everyone in the band is wearing weird masks & the lead singer is throwing his limbs around like he’s channeling heaven & hell & all of his nerves are burning with the collective passion & fury.
Overall, I felt incredibly lucky to get reasonable tickets to this show (I was one of the few I spoke with that paid the OG presale price & stood next to a couple in line who paid $300 each) & the show itself was a highlight of my year of concert-going (nothing can top July but this came close). Would I go out to see Sleep Token again? In an instant. But with their popularity rising, this may have just been my one lucky show where everything was beautiful with the ticket & venue situations & I’ve come to terms with that & I’m so grateful for this experience.
Verses on Verses is a biweekly music column from the perspective of a poet. Inquiries can be directed to LE Francis, lefrancis@sagecigarettes.com.
LE Francis (she/her) is the managing editor of Sage Cigarettes Magazine; a columnist & staff artist for Cream Scene Carnival Magazine; co-host & staff editor of A Ghost in the Magazine & The Annegirls Podcast; & the author of THIS SPELL OF SONG & STAR available through Bottlecap Press. She is a writer, musician, & visual artist living in the rainshadow of the Washington Cascades. Find her online at nocturnical.com.
