Today’s FREE MP3 as Track Of The Day goes tent-shaped and tomahawk sharp. Click here for previous Tracks Of The Day.Words: Scott Rowley

Welcome to our first Tee Pee Tuesday, the day that Track Of The Day goes tent-shaped and tomahawk sharp. Featuring free music from smokin’ New York rawk label Tee Pee, come back every week for another track from some of the hottest new bands on the reservation. First up: Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound – The Slumbering Ones.

I played this in the office the other day. “Jeez – you really ARE getting into your prog these days,” said progophobe Sian Llewellyn. (Sian gets scared if a song is 6 minutes long and – though she too has fallen for new prog wonders Crippled Black Phoenix – is disturbed by some of the crazy sounds wafting from the CR team’s massive speakers, mostly courtesy of Geoff Barton.)

As mentioned somewhere in the forums on this website, I’m not sure what prog rock is these days and I doubt that Assemble Head In Sunburst Sound consider themselves prog. I’m not even sure that this is what you could call progressive –the most up-to-date musical reference I can come up with is the ‘psychedelic punk’ of the shoegazing scene of the early 90s (Swervedriver, Ride etc), or the gnarly lo-fi grunge of early Dinosaur Jr – and they don’t have too much in common with them either apart from the odd riff and a heap of pile-driving white noise.

To paraphrase trip-hop bad boy Tricky (ooh, aren’t we modern?), this is so brand new, it’s retro. It’s music from the cutting edge – if you accept that the cutting edge was at its sharpest in 1969.

With it’s lazily chiming guitars and woozy female backing vocals, The Slumbering Ones (taken from forthcoming third album When Sweet Sleep Returned) can remind you of The Byrds at their trippiest, of a blissed-out Jefferson Airplane, of Crazy Horse with JJ Cale on guitar (listen to the solo around 3.10)… but most of all it sounds like the soundtrack to an intense scene in a great movie. Play it over the ending of The Long Good Friday, as Bob Hoskins sits in the back of the car putting the pieces together and contemplating his fate, and tell me I’m wrong.

Get it here: http://teepeerecords.com/media/assemble_head_-_the_slumbering_ones.mp3

Click here for previous Tracks Of The Day.