Armor For Sleep, I The Mighty July 20, 2012

Armor For Sleep

Perhaps the most reflective moments of our lives are lived in the minutes before sleep completely drowns out our consciousness. We are forced to face our thoughts and at the same time admit that sleep will soon wash them all away. Armor for Sleep is about capturing these moments. It's rare these days to find a band that interlaces a theme or a common thread throughout the lyrical fabric of its songwriting. And it is precisely this regard for literary technique that immediately sets Armor for Sleep apart from so many of its contemporaries. Singer and songwriter, Ben Jorgensen's lyrics abound with images of space, time-travel and dreams. He incorporates these metaphorical motifs throughout many of his songs to express solitude and disaffection in a manner that not only sheds new light on these ideas, but also so poignantly hits the proverbial nail on the head. Jorgensen correlates emotional alienation to physical insignificance in the scope of the cosmos, he sees the world of dreams as a world of escape but also of trepidation and he uses the bitter cold of winter to parallel the bitter cold of the human condition. Musically, Armor for Sleep's style is dark and delicate, but at the same time painfully distant. The guitars can be as remote as the lyrics and then unexpectedly explode into melodic phrases. There is a meticulously crafted dynamic of ambient and airy spaces combined with choruses that are heavy and driving and at times reminiscent of early Sunny Day Real Estate. The amazing thing though, is how infectious the songs are, and how they can be so without being the least bit poppy or generic. The songwriting will immediately draw you in, but it is the vocals that keep you there. Jorgensen's voice has a quality and a natural tone that soothes, but at the same time overruns with anxiety as one notices the intense emotion fueling it

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