Soulstice - “Sleepwalk”
~Zumi Underground
“SleepWalk” gives us a nice long intro to really get entranced in the music. The hypnotic strings and steady drums lull me to tranquility before Soulstice’s smooth vocals layer in.
This is the kind of song that you can easily chill out to as background music, but if you’re in the mood, you can listen closely and start dissecting the bars for meaning for what seems pretty straight forward on the surface. Take the lines “The soul can’t be killed / so death can’t be real / that’s why I can’t be quiet / and can’t be still”, with the artist’s name being Soulstice, you can wonder if there’s a specific reference to him having an immortal soul or if it’s more general.
Either way, I thought it was interesting how he continued to build on that concept with the chorus of the song repeating writing about what you see, writing/art arguably being immortal unless lost, and lines of “architecture, build bars and measures / so build ‘em strong enough they gotta handle the pressure”.
There are some cool rhymes in the song I hadn’t really seen before that maybe don’t look like rhymes if you’re just reading text such as the opening bars “All stories are eventually told / At the center of my soul, I’m a century old” and “Pages of vacuums that swallow black fumes”. However, Soulstice delivers the bars without any kind of emphasis or vowel manipulation (like how people will rhyme “train” and “again”) and it still registers as a rhyme in my ears.
I love tracks like this that let you take away as much or as little as you want from it and enjoy it no matter what.
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