Sheavy's second album, and first for The Music Cartel, is another diverse set mixing heavy metal, stoner metal, and space rock in equal measures, with an extra set of bones thrown at psychedelic and folk music as well. The band's songwriting skills were still in their developmental stage at this time, however, resulting in ups and downs not always predicated by the actual stylistic shifts, but rather the uneven nature of each separate song. Excellent opener "Virtual Machine" pretty much stands alone in qualitative terms, feeding its gargantuan rotating riff (and everything else, for that matter) through a virtual tunnel of processed distortion that serves as perfect fodder for extended head-nodding bliss. The
Sabbath-styled ballad "Savanna" and energetic rockers like "Automaton" and "Saving Me" show momentary flashes of inspiration, but exceedingly average offerings like the title track, the needlessly nine-minute "Stardust," and the folky "Velvet" never really go anywhere. Other than serving to highlight vocalist Steve Hennessy's disturbingly clonelike
Ozzy Osbourne impression, these cuts mostly just trudge along unconvincingly. In short,
Electric Sleep was essentially a holding pattern for the Canadian quartet, but they'd take corrective matters on the next year's quite improved
Celestial Hi-Fi. ~ Eduardo Rivadavia