Review: Asleep - Unpleasant Companion

Having toured since '06 with bands like the Deftones and The Flaming Lips, Asleep knows a thing or two about what makes a good live show. With the help of engineer Steve Albini (whose work you've heard on albums by Nirvana, Pixies, PJ Harvey, and many others), they've attempted to put that live feeling into an album. In many ways they pull that off and it makes Unpleasant Companion unique. At the same time, sometimes they do it so well that it takes away some of the perks of listening to a studio recording.

Incubus fans are going to notice one thing about this album immediately. As soon as the volume goes up, vocalist Todd Kaden starts to sound a lot like Incubus frontman, Brandon Boyd. I suppose whether that's a good or a bad thing depends on how into what you were listening to around 1999-2002 (were you in?) Just know that there's a lot of passion in what he sings and he's not afraid to yell at you to get the point across (or get the chorus stuck in your head)

They put a lot of effort into creating a "live" vibe for this album and it shows. Little things like the drummer counting off at the beginning of "Must've Been" help create the illusion that everything you're listening to is happening right in front of you. Recreating a live sound often leaves an album sounding like it was recorded in someone's garage. But in this case, they do a great job of making sure it doesn't sound amateur. The only downside is that when things really pick up, it gets a lot harder to understand what Kaden says. That can be kind of a big deal when the lyrics are a key part of an album.

Though not a concept album, the songs here do revolve around a core idea. According to the band, "The album's central theme explores how we manage to stay so addictively connected yet simplistically separated from one another through the same digital loops in the current fabric of the information age."

If the tone of the album is any indication, they're not all that happy about it. Aside from the obligatory acoustic final track, Unpleasant Companion is a forceful wake-up call in most every sense of the phrase.