Team Sleep

Yeah, this is sensible: going to a loud gig with a head full of sinus-clogging snot and a pounding resonating within my skull akin to someone parking a John Deere with its engine still running atop your forehead. Nice. Still, Team Sleep aren’t exactly likely to punish the innermost tunnels of one’s hearing gear, are they?

I nearly never find out – Mr Frisky The Doorman can’t let me in without searching every single square inch of my backpack. I know, I bring such annoyance on myself by carrying around a bag full of CDs and, like, stuff, but this is taking the most yellow of piss. I mean, do you have to put your hands there? Those? Those are postcards made by new graduates at Goldsmiths (I’ve just been to the end-of-year show). What, you need to take them off me? I could hand them out? Are you… oh, it doesn’t matter. Look, just take them. Enjoy. Bye.

After another brief altercation with the List Lady (I’m Mike Davies for the night because apparently he’s already gone in as Mike Diver) I’m in, plunged into the ever-discomforting combination of dank darkness and smoke-trailed air guaranteed to have these symptoms playing right up within all of three minutes. Chino and co are already on, backed by the kind of ‘artistic’ short-film accompaniment that wouldn’t have seemed out of place south of the river a half-hour ago. Look! A big eye! Wow! Such a visual distraction is absolutely necessary, though, as Team Sleep do not do showmanship, drummer Zach Hill aside. The Hella man has been criticised for his timekeeping – or rather for his lack of – since the band arrived in the UK, but tonight his wayward beats and jazzy, gotta-be-improv fills add a welcome human aspect to music so very reliant upon technology.

It’s only when the music threatens to spiral out of control, the live drums simply too fast for computers to keep pace, that Team Sleep become as aurally appealing to the casual viewer as a Supersize meal must be to Mr Moreno (sorry, but the guy has put the pounds back on). The Deftones man is the star attraction, of course, but his contributions never particularly differ from his input into his day job – sing, play some guitar, lean into the crowd, repeat. It’s the faceless cohorts that provide the unsubtle electrified beats – more prominent live than on the band’s eponymous album – but even they fall foul of noticeable limitations. The Rob Crow (of Pinback, among others) chorus on ‘Our Ride To The Rectory’ is ‘delivered’ by another, whose abilities are hindered further by the soundman’s incompetence (he fails to turn the microphone up, leaving a man, centre stage, singing into a wall of impenetrable noise). Hill’s cymbal-shattering drum skills prove to be the only real highlight of a set where songs blend seamlessly into each other, forming a cacophony of like-for-like trip-rock meanderings – I swear they play ‘Ever (Foreign Flag)’ eight times. No? Sounds like it.

If Deftones’ Adrenaline had been born and bred on the banks of the Severn rather than in sunny California, then this is maybe where Moreno’s main concern would have been in the mid-1990s. In 2005, though, this music is little more than a parody of once genre-defining beats ‘n’ pieces. I take my snotty nose and aching joints up the stairs and out into the present day; at Tottenham Court Road station, a Carling-approved busker is covering Dido’s ‘Thank You’.

It almost sounds cutting edge when drowning in the clickedy-click pulse of a passing train. Perhaps the group upstairs should lower themselves a few levels and learn a few things in the process...