Sleeping In The Aviary have always had a hard time sitting still. After forming right here in Madison, some seven years ago, the then-foursome released two albums of hyper-active jangly punk songs on Science of Sound records before riding over to Minnesota's Twin Cities and picking up a fifth member. On their first dispatch from the Land o' Lakes, Great Vacation, Sleeping In The Aviary ditch their most screeching punk styles for a more flush album that reins back their wild catharsis with dapper production and tidy pop numbers.
If you've somehow missed the boat and you're curious what Sleeping in the Aviary sound like live, listen to their debut, Oh, This Old Thing? But anyone who's seen them since 2008 can tell you that Expensive Vomit in a Cheap Hotel standouts like ""Everybody's Different, Everybody Dies"" take on a similarly frenetic vein in their live interpretations. So I know what you're thinking, and you're right—these songs sound quite a bit different live.
That's symptomatic of the internal disconnect for Sleeping In The Aviary. Live, they invoke inspiration from punk bands like the Buzzcocks or mid-'80s Hüsker Dü. On record, they draw more influence from twangy pop acts. They're loose and dishevelled by nature, but on Great Vacation they make a concerted effort to look nice and clean for the consumer.
In some ways, Great Vacation also marks a graduation process. Instead of desperate thrashings for acceptance or vengeance, Great Vacation offers quaint novellas like ""Last Kiss on a Sinking Ship."" They've matured past picking fights, and when lead singer Elliott Kozel says, ""And I know that you've been lonely / By the length of the skirts you wear,"" he's not asking for a second chance.
But I'd be lying if I said everything translated perfectly. ""Blacked-out Fun"" in particular struggles to marry disjointed elements of '50s with angular distorted guitar. Crowd-pleaser ""The Very Next Day I Died"" doesn't benefit much from the polished presentation here, and ""Maria's Ghost"" doesn't do enough to turn its fatalist masochism into vaudeville. In each case they try to satisfy two disparate ideas that end up going in different directions, leaving them stuck in the middle with little to show for themselves.
Full immersion is the key for Sleeping In The Aviary, and their biggest successes come when they tear down the fourth wall and refuse to short-change themselves. On older records, that usually meant kicking-and-screaming rock 'n' roll, but on Great Vacation it's noted by more subtle intimacy. Keyboard/accordion/hacksaw player Celeste Heule takes over lead vocals on ""Axes Ground Looth Tooth,"" a cozy piano-driven meditation on humility and expectations. Kozel follows it with ""Start the Car,"" another tamed reflection on vulnerability. It concludes a three-song stretch that sees Sleeping In The Aviary at its most disarming, and it's the most unlikely of successes in their catalog.
Thematically, Great Vacation is just as dislocated and lost as any of the group's previous efforts. Functionally, though, it portrays a band finally getting comfortable in its own skin. Sleeping In The Aviary are notorious for putting literal blood and sweat into every live performance, but it's all detached from the band's true strength—writing terrific, heart-soaked pop songs. Great Vacation offers both a reprieve from the tear-soaked hysteria of yore for a more accomplished and diverse band; and a moment of illumination in which we realize that Sleeping In The Aviary should be getting ready to move somewhere new—somewhere much, much bigger.
