For a duo creating such sparse music, it’s surprising how Tara Cunningham and Jack Cooper (both from Modern Nature; he’s also in Ultimate Painting and collaborates with Apartment House) sound so fluid, without mixing restraint with tension or control with anxiety. As for guitar music, The Sleeves combine improvised guitar with a sort of slowcore revival. Listening to their self-titled album, released this year, is like stepping into a time capsule and hearing Low for the first time. The comparison is somewhat unfair to Low, because the trio were unique – and, towards the end, unpredictable – but The Sleeves capture the formula of doing a lot with very little. And that’s why Low spring to mind. The rapid-fire use of words helps too.
But a comparison is just a comparison. The Sleeves have their own merit. The secret lies in that fluidity, which manifests itself in the guitars, which run in endless lines, finding a solution for the next moment, and in how the words and phrases justify themselves, even when they often seem incomplete. The aim is simple: in The Sleeves’ songs, we feel that there is always something left to do, and both musicians are masterful at conveying this through the way they leave their ideas slightly unfinished. It is music that says it all because there is something left unsaid, and which conveys that everything is fine. That is why there is no anxiety in this sense of control – because it isn’t really control – and that is why anxiety never materialises, because there is nothing to be anxious about. One accepts that things are fine just as they are.
The fullness of The Sleeves lies in what remains to be filled in. What we hear in the silences, what we feel when an idea seems to have ended halfway through, what we feel like doing when a song ends in a murmur (of a voice, of a guitar, it doesn’t matter) and is left hanging on a response. Perhaps there is no response. The Sleeves are a beautiful embodiment of that space between suggestion and realisation, with a fabulous calm, a sense of relaxation that truly relaxes. They are the musical ASMR you never expected to hear.
AS