Melody Maker 7 Jan 95

Sleeper/Goya Dress

Le Chat Bleu, Bordeaux

     Sleeper are poised to be great. Indeed, they're perilously near to magnificence tonight. This perfectly (un)balanced, startlingly focused pop band, who are about to unleashed 1995's first very special life-is-like-this album upon us, tonight win over this super-hip French crowd, plus a live radio audience of million or so, with impressively nonchalant aplomb. Sleeper blitz us with 40 minutes of perfect, piston-powered spindly modern pop teeming with dynamics and cunning tensions. Sleeper are ace.
     But first...
     But first, Goya Dress tiptoed on stage in this giant chic barn and spin the watching crowd into a state of half-approval, half-bafflement. Goya Dress are an angular trio fronted by a combative, deeply-driven Shetland Islander named Astrid, and they sketch evocative mini-operas which put me in mind of Siouxsie, Muses, Cranes or The Krankies, depending on where I'm standing. "Foetus", a song about fucking a partner's mind until it's black, is a contrary and contradictory and Goya Dress are too static and laden with pregnant pauses, but hten Astrid says, "Merci" in a Scots accent and the crowd love her. Goya Dress are very pretty, but I'd like to see them bleed.
     Ah, Sleeper! Louise Wener and supporting cast appear, nod through "1-2-3-4" and fire straight into the itchy "Swallow", and I realised- what a fucking great, sparky, canny group they've become! How spectacularly they've upped their ante!
     I mean, Sleeper! Who'd have thought it?
     Sleeper, a mass of engrossing tensions, have tantalised us now with two or three not quite there teasing singles, but, with "Inbetweener", they've hit gold dust. "Inbetweener" is sheer pop genius, an angst-laden sexy swagger which mockingly, stutteringly, contemplates the mediocre lot of those who decide at far too early an age to play safe and stop routinely achieving the impossible. It rocks like a cougar on castors. "Inbetweener" has Sleeper's trademark air of walkabout distraction couple to sudden unsettling intensity, and Louise airily claims later that she wrote it in five minutes. I guess we've no choice but to believe her.
     So Sleeper flaunt their shockingly seductive selection of short, sharp, charged-up pop songs about youth and being alive and how the former is far more important than the latter, and the crowd love them. Louise is immaculately pensive: she never looks quite sure that she's doing this. John, meanwhile, treats himself to some sly, Showy guitar heroics on the stop-start, fidgety "Lady Love Your Countryside". The French particularly enjoy that bit.
     I suspect that the infamous line on "Delicious" about going to bed and fucking until you're raw will haunt Louise for months to come, and maybe they should even drop the song from the set for a while. But Sleeper steam into songs about sex and relationships and power games because these are The Big Ones, and quite right, too: no matter what the kitsch-pusher try to tell you, kids, pop is no place for small talk. Sleeper waste nobody's time.
     As Britpop continues to ascend into the firmament, the wired and poerful Sleeper come bursting past yer Echobellys and Elasticas and Genes and Sheds to lead the heady charge. Sleeper in France are fascinating, foreboding, provocative, charming, inspirational.
     Honestly (sorry), they Bordeaux'd on the miraculous.