“Sleepyhead”
from the EP Chunk of Change
2008
iTunes
This’ll make for a nice change, at least, when it gets discovered by the guy on your floor whose morning alarm is the guitar intro from the Beatles’ “Revolution” blasting at arena-ready volume. As with Beat Happening’s “Sleepy Head,” Belle & Sebastian’s “We Are the Sleepyheads,” or most of the discography of 1990s U.S. twee-poppers Sleepyhead, there’s really not much sleepy about “Sleepyhead,“ a genre-crossing jolt of euphoric energy on Boston five-piece Passion Pit’s debut EP Chunk of Change. “Everything is going to the beat,” a man mutters at the outset (the sped-up voice is Jack Kerouac’s, from one of his spoken word albums), and a steady, wooden thump soon falls in beneath synthetic handclaps, gliding bass, and strobing, keyboard-like sounds.
“Sleepyhead” may not be sleepy, but it’s decidedly dreamy, a glistening array of woozy textures that call to mind both the atmospheric twee-scapes of A Sunny Day in Glasgow and the ecstatic seaside fantasias of Air France. The vocals, thin and a touch higher than Spencer Krug’s, are indie rock all the way, once again making “Sleepyhead” more wakeful than somnolent. “They couldn’t think of something to say the day you burst,” sings Michael Angelako. Well, maybe if I were more awake…