Sleeping Bag

Sleeping Bag members Dave Segedy (vocals, drums), Lewis Rogers (guitar), and David Woodruff (bass) reinvent rock & roll on their self-titled debut album. Sounding perhaps six months removed from having picked up their instruments for the first time, the musicians have mastered the fundamentals of rock's simplest structures, and they re-create them, along the way evoking similar simple arrangements by everyone from the early Beach Boys to early Talking Heads. This sort of rudimentary playing is often called garage rock, but Sleeping Bag isn't really aggressive enough for such a designation; call this living room rock. Amid the familiar chord structures and keep-the-beat drumming, Segedy sings in a light, uninvolved voice, more concerned with the overall sound than the meaning of the words; indeed, he is content to repeat the same words over and over again, sometimes even intoning "Giddy up!" repeatedly, as falsetto backups make like teenage Beach Boys behind him. But if Sleeping Bag is nothing new, the players nevertheless capture the charm of innocent, light-hearted pop/rock as it's been played so many times over so many decades by so many others before them. ~ William Ruhlmann