October 13, 2012 by A.S. Van Dorston

I already wrote about My Sleeping Karma in last week’s Album Rundown, but their fourth and latest album Soma haunted me to the extent that I got the disc to dig deeper into the sound. The path that lead me to the band started after Colour Haze became one of my favorite bands. I eventually checked out pretty much everything on the roster of their Elektrohasch label, leading me to Aschaffenburg, Germany’s My Sleeping Karma’s second album, Satya (2008). While they could easily be categorized as heavy stoner/psych with sprawling songs featuring some mesmerizing guitar riffs, they are certainly not merely Colour Haze acolytes. Seppi developed his own signature guitar tones that are usually cleaner to the point of crystalline beauty, augmented by some fabulous space-rock keyboards. On Tri (2010) they dug deeper into spiritual interests moving from Buddhism to Hinduism, with Eastern melodies snaking their way into the songs. Now they’ve graduated from the one-man shop Elektrohasch to Napalm Records, and have unleashed their best album yet. Soma is the drink that originated with the Vedic, Zoroastrian and greater Persian cultures. They believed humans could achieve immortality with it. The Rigveda, one of the oldest known texts from the Iron Age, devoted over 100 hymns to it. If the ancient people could get past the shock of hearing electrically amplified guitars, bass and drums, they might approve of My Sleeping Karma’s contribution to the Soma-inspired canon.

There has always been a faintly subtle influence of prog rock on their music, and it’s come more to the forefront on these new astral excursions, with deceptively simple, cyclical guitar riffs embellished with sensitive, Matt’s almost jazzy drumming, bass and Norman’s swirling space-rock keyboards. Nearly every song is followed by a short interlude that provide bridges of interesting sound experiments while offering interesting variety in the album’s flow. The meat of the album of course in the six longer tracks, each of them referring to key ingredients of the soma drink, such as “Pachyclada,” “Ephedra” and “Psilocybe.” All of them have much to offer, from the dramatic launch of “Pachyclada” to Steffen’s wonderfully dubby bass sound in “Somalatha.” Rather than map out every change and crescendo of these instrumentals, it’s better just to say they’ve come up with an original approach that’s highly recommended. There may be other much less interesting but more critically trendy instrumental post-rock and post-metal albums that will garner more attention this year, which would be a shame. It may be mellow enough to fall asleep to in the background, but don’t make the mistake of sleeping on this gem and missing out.

Posted in: New Album(s) of the Week, Reviews