The Sleeveens

Reviews

The Sleeveens Downtown / Drowning 7″

The hits keep on coming for the SLEEVEENS. The latest offering from this Nashville/Dublin combo shows their continued ability to take three-minute songs and make them feel like epic journeys. A lot of this amplification and magnification of sounds and sensations surely comes first from the emotive vocal delivery, but the instrumentation across the board definitely bears load on these creations. “Downtown” specifically just feels larger than life, and also shows that the band is really finding their sweet spot. Their first single, “Give My Regards to the Dancing Girls,” was an awesome way to debut their sound, but it did leave me wondering a bit about the decision of the over-five-minute runtime. When the song appeared again as the opening track to their debut full-length, the track was cut down by almost three minutes, which then ironically left me wondering about all that was left off of it. The three-minute runtime of “Downtown” hits every note with every second sounding vital, surely pleasing even the fussiest of the punk rock Goldilockses.

The Sleeveens UFOs / Bernadette 7″

The SLEEVEENS kind of blew up the garage punk interworlds when they released their debut album on Dirtnap this year. They came out of the Nashville scene, playing blistering garage punk like the OBLIVIANS with a MARKED MEN precision. They were tapped by I-94 for their Detroit covers series, where bands put an original song on one side of a 45 and a cover on the flipside. Here they turn their energy down a bit for a trippy, hypnotic garage burner called “UFOs” on the A-side. The B-side is their take of the FOUR TOPS classic “Bernadette” in a sped-up, anthemic blast.

The Sleeveens The Sleeveens LP

The SLEEVEENS are garage punk done cracking, in the typical spirit of Dirtnap. I have not run across this band before, but it turns out they are a dual-citizen team from both Nashville and Dublin. Solid record throughout, with a killer cover of the UNDERTONES’ “Get Over You.”  “Metallica Font” is another toe-tapper. The rest of the lot is pretty run-of-the-mill, beer-sudsed basement anthems.