Slumber party

By GRAHAM REID

Good local albums are arriving with remarkable regularity these days. From reggae to ragged rock, singer-songwriters to psychedelic pop, they keep turning up.

In that latter category you can now add Sleepers Union whose impressive debut Giant Spheres lets loose some sublimely trippy pop and a kind of drone ambience. At times it conjures up the spirit of Flaming Lips, in other places a disconcerting alt.country pop gone wonky. It charms with its quietness - although unleashes a blitzkrieg of guitars sometimes which can be seriously alarming - and has its reference points all over the pop map.

The main man behind Sleepers Union is Simon Maclaren whose pedigree includes Loves Ugly Children and the Subliminals, but there are other fingerprints here, too: members of Stereobus, Fang and Solid Gold Hell also crop up.

Yet while the five-piece line-up of Sleepers Union which debuts tonight includes some of those members, there are some not on the album.

"I'm trying to look at things in a series of projects now," says Maclaren. "I guess if you look at my history you can break it down into recording projects and live projects anyway, they don't necessarily have to involve exactly the same people really.

"The record is collaborative in that it needed other people for it to happen, and needs people for me to go out and play it obviously. Now that a band exists as such, if everything is humming along nicely that could be the vehicle for the next recording project, I guess."

Maclaren says bands are difficult to keep together for many reasons - financial and personal among them - and that while he likes a good band, he also respects those that keep changing.

"When you are young you tend to think you are bound to the people you started working with, but it's really just a random, haphazard process anyway in the way the relationships were formed. But I like a band that's good then splits up, or one like Guided by Voices which keeps changing its members and so the sound keeps evolving.

"Bands have classic phases and I guess there's that point when people stop bouncing off each other in the right ways and it's almost inevitable there has to be a resolution to it."

Break up in other words.

For Sleepers Union Maclaren played his new songs to others and the good contributions they made stuck.

"We built the album from the ground up and did rhythm tracks with various people and brought in various people for overdubs as we felt like it. It was a long process in terms of my other recordings in that it lasted over six months. But the bulk of the album fell together in two of those months. It all coalesced and there it was. Then we just needed to round it off a bit."

The most noticeable change in Maclaren's writing for Sleepers Union is that the volume and intensity has been turned down. At 33 he admits he is slowing down from his wild and noisy days.

"There's something about the boundless energy of youth which expresses itself in volume and pace, but it only goes so far. I think I'm slowing down gracefully. I guess it's because I've spent quite a long time listening to alt.country music and that's about as quiet as it gets.

"It was the love of the Palace Brothers and Red House Painters which took me there, so some of that is seeping in sideways into my music.

"And I guess my music now has a more conversational tone, it reflects music I listen to which is melodic and doesn't take your ears off."

So tonight might be, for want of a better phrase, a listening evening?

"Absolutely. We're going to have visuals but this is the first time we've played and I'm apprehensive and excited. But it should have some of that droney, psychedelic, get-lost-in-it vibe in parts. But a lot of it is just pop music, too, so it should be an interesting mix."

Performance

* Who: Sleepers Union with Rawer and Third Party Influence

* Where: Kings Arms

* When: Tonight