"IT STARTED as a way not to die," says Hart Gledhill of Portland's Sleeping Beauties. "It started as a way to kill time from diarrhea, from Hot Pockets, and not vomiting."
While poetic in its disgusting flourishes, the nihilism of Gledhill and Sleeping Beauties is no put-on. Their new self-titled debut is a bleary-eyed, teeth-grinding, drug-fueled document of sleepless nights and wasted days from the dish pit to the grease pit, the flophouse to the gutter. It's a political screed from the stepped on and the stepped over, the vital punk record America needs to hear but won't be able to stomach.
It's also a sentimental reckoning—inspired, haunted by, and dedicated to Gledhill's father Blake, who died last year.
Gledhill remembers "watching Mets games and hanging out in the hospital. Holding his hand. And feeling his hand go cold. Watching [Mets pitcher] Bartolo Colon 'roided up and doing great and feeling my dad cold and leaving. Fuck you. It's done."