When I reviewed Port-Royal’s Afraid to Dance (2007) last year I mentioned that there weren’t a lot of bands that made music so close to laptop-based electronica. The same could be said for the debut from label-mates Our Sleepless Forest, though for slightly different reasons. It’s true that this English trio is equally concerned with sounds in the most abstract sense, but rather than simply re-creating electronic genres under the guise of a live band Our Sleepless Forest are out to reinvent current underground rock streams like post-rock, free folk, and shoegaze by ingeniously toying with their often predictable structures. Or, to put it another way: it’s not often that a band’s Myspace can list influences as diverse as Sigur Rós, Animal Collective, Gang Gang Dance, and Stars of the Lid and actually sound like they’ve internalized and conflated all of those bands’ innovations, but here it is.

And just looking at these influences suggests an interesting dichotomy: on one hand we have Brooklyn-based noiseniks who thrive on spontaneity and serendipity while on the other we have bands who have practically defined the term “glacial” by stretching notes into infinity and creating tranquil environments. If I had to pick one, I’d say Our Sleepless Forest belongs more comfortably in the latter category; the album is lush in every sense of the word, and the band doesn’t resort to primal moaning or screaming (or actually any prominent vocal sounds at all). Still, the band flirts with chaos here, even if they do it in a way which is remarkably easy to listen to: opening track “Nomads” starts and ends with a four-note bass riff around one chord à la Spacemen 3, and uses this rather basic foundation to layer sheets of reverb that are probably guitars but remind me more of Gas than Cocteau Twins. In the middle the core rhythm drops out and an acoustic guitar sounds like it’s going to pull the track into a softer section but the wall of sound never retreats, creating an effect where you never quite make out the rhythm of the guitar picking and it registers as a faint, droning hum.

Then there’s all the other stuff: something that could either be a pile of synths or distant voices, an awesome percussion break, possibly a sitar, and what sounds like a massive Glenn Branca guitar orchestra reduced to background noise. And this is just the first track. Sleepless indeed.

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