Sleepy Tigers

by Margaret RegesIf the Sleepy Tigers EP offers any indication of what Her Space Holiday's 2009 full-length, XOXO, Panda and the New Kid Revival, it's this: this might be Mark Bianchi's sunniest, fuzzy-wuzziest, most fun loving work yet. True, his lyrics are still as wry and sardonic as ever (In "Just Another Day," he sings, "It's just another day in candy land. It's more than I can stand."), and his vocal delivery is still graced with a good dose of Dennis the Menace-style mischief, especially on "This Seat Is Definitely Taken." The difference here is in the instrumentation -- instead of surrounding himself with ambitious computerized landscapes, Bianchi generally relies on a humbler palette of sounds on the Sleepy Tigers EP: some handclaps, a tambourine, a bit of glockenspiel here and there, and a good ol' acoustic guitar. It makes him sound a lot like the Boy Least Likely To and Oh No! Oh My!, especially on the disc's title track -- a jaunty, handclaps-and-tambourines affair with a down-home feel and sweet-as-pie lyrics ("You'll make biscuits and I'll make tea, and curl up close and then fall asleep to the sound of no one else around"). And aside from the disc's last track (which consists of nearly five minutes of Bianchi reading an excerpt from the writings of Henry Darger over a banjo loop that sounds like it came straight out of Ken Burns' The Civil War), Sleepy Tigers contains some of the humblest, sweetest-sounding work Bianchi has made as Her Space Holiday.