Lyrics Don’t Matter in Sleep Station’s The Pride of Chester James

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Author: Eric Jensen, Managing Editor

You have to be a sap to like this album. The calm, calculated acoustic guitar, the hushed vocals, the jadedly pensive lyrics-this is the theme music for hip, androgynous coffee shop dwellers who overuse words like “inspiration” and have strong beliefs about what really constitutes vintage clothing.

This is bad news for me because I can’t stop listening to it. Sleep Station’s The Pride of Chester James, while irrefutably a soundtrack for sissies with its first track proclaiming “The sun rains down on me/ I can feel it in my heart,” is nevertheless musically compelling. The drippy lyrics are easy to overlook, especially for those who have developed a taste for modern folk arrangements of acts like Bright Eyes, the Decemberists and Damien Rice.

Sleep Station frontman David Debiak, who also headed New London Fire for its 2006 release I Sing the Body Holographic, has a somewhat grassroots approach to his music. Over the course of about three years, he and his band-mates recorded most of the tracks on Chester James in their own basements and bedrooms on a vintage tape machine.

In a press release from Eyeball Records, Debiak recalls Brad Paxton’s work on the track “Always in the Fire” as representative of the entire recording process.

“I asked how he got a choir to sing on the song only to find out that it was just him and his mom huddled in his bedroom layering vocal tracks,” he said.

Debiak’s projects are almost always labeled as concept albums, covering topics from astronauts abandoned in outer space to the story of Dr. Carl Von Cosel, a necrophiliac who falls in love with his dead patient. While Debiak has been known to deny that any of these were intended to be concept albums, he conceded to share the origins of Chester James on his MySpace blog:

“In the summer of 1997, I came across two one-foot-tall people at a state fair, and ever since then, the haunting image of their musical performance has led to many songs and stories created from the experience. Only now have I decided to put these songs together on one record.”

The state fair theme surfaces discreetly throughout the album, particularly in instrumentals and solos performed on Hammond organs and Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos that the band selected to promote the sense of being at a carnival. But the occasional inclusion of an accordion solo hardly defines the album as a whole.

On its best tracks, Chester Jame is absolutely vibrant. While the overt references to prayer and Heaven give some songs a Christian-rock-like feel, the lulling acoustic “Hell Has Come With Me” is indisputably beautiful. The more complex folk composition on “Anna” features deft harmonies and a tight combination of string instruments, and “What You Hide” boasts intricate production that one would never expect to come out of a residential basement.

Ultimately, while no self-respecting listener would be caught dead singing along, The Pride of Chester James is a solid display of Sleep Station’s musicianship. Maybe it makes me a sap-but for me, that’s enough.

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