Seven Day Sleep
A Home For Disgusting Fairies EP
(Self-Release)
Seven Day Sleep has created something truly extraordinarily unique with their new EP, A Home For Disgusting Fairies. This is the band’s first release outside of a single, although the goth rockers have all participated in various musical projects in the past. The band’s guitar player and bassist/keyboardist – Okan Isik and Can Temz, respectively – come from Turkey where they had a rock band called MODEL. The band’s front woman, Sofia Ruszczyk, grew up in Switzerland.
The EP feels like a synthesis of the hard rock of bands like Lacuna Coil with a bit of the EBM of bands like Combichrist, with Ruszczyk taking the listener down a remarkably horror-filled and yet somewhat relatable journey through her lyrics.
For instance, on the first single released by the band, “Red Lipstick Murders,” Ruszczyk sings through the story of a witch that had no strikes against her besides her personal practices. Nonetheless, the rest of her coven was apparently murdered, so the song tells the story of the aforementioned witch taking matters into her own hands, so to speak.
Ruszczyk has explained the song as an exploration of the clash between individuality and the push of the mass. Other songs take similarly relatable themes, such as love and obsessive introspection, and explore them through similarly horror-tinged glasses. The band has cited My Chemical Romance as an influence, and there’s even a curious point on the album that helps reinforce that point, when, in “Red Lipstick Murders,” Ruszczyk sings the line “Hang ‘em high!” “Hang ‘Em High” is the title of a song from My Chemical Romance’s landmark 2004 release Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge.
With MCR sticking more with gothic European pop as their musical backbone, Seven Day Sleep’s patronage of MCR is as much of an aesthetic one as anything. Musically, Seven Day Sleep very much carves themselves out a new space, with their fusion of everything from heavy synth beats to heavy guitar lines to occasional screamed vocals creating something aurally pleasing to listen to. The music has a lot of depth, and it’s very listenable, with the feeling that it’s taking something normally reserved for fringe elements of society and making it remarkably palatable.
