Song Of The Week: 7/1/12

Song: "Princeton Review"

Artist: Team Sleep

Album: "Team Sleep"

Year: 2005



"Princeton Review" is a song that appears to be about a relationship that is frozen. It just isn't going anywhere. This is mostly because of things that happened in the past that they seem to not want to bring up and argue over, but those things are inevitable and they keep coming to the forefront. Whatever indiscretions or any sort of broken trust stands out in the relationship like an elephant in the room. It will never cease to be in the past, therefore the relationship is stuck in a rut. Team Sleep formed as an official band in 2000, hailing from Sacramento, California. The band is a side project and creation of Chino Moreno, who is the lead singer of the rock band Deftones. Moreno, along with his friend Todd Wilkinson, would often get together and dabble in working on some music, even before Team Sleep was officially a band. In fact, the two had no intentions at first to release any music or even perform live, they just enjoyed playing music together. The two men began working with DJ Crook, who performed on the Deftones song "Teenager" which appeared on the band's "White Pony" album. DJ Crook provided Moreno and Wilkinson the beats for which Team Sleep would perform over. Unlike the Deftones chugging guitar sound and hard driven rock edge, Team Sleep was much more based in atmospheric, electronica, almost like trip-hop, vastly different from Moreno's rock roots. The band would feature several artists who perform on various songs, including Rob Crow who provided vocals along with Moreno on "Princeton Review". Their debut self-titled album was originally slated to be released in 2003, but the project was scrapped due to Moreno being unhappy that most of their demos were leaked on the internet before the release. The band would re-work most of the material, changing most of it for what would finally be released in 2005 to the public. In 2007, Team Sleep was said to be working on new material for their second album. Moreno went on to say that new material would not see the light of day until 2010, he also stated that the band may possibly release free EP's of songs that the band would promote on their MySpace page. To this date, none of this material has been released. Currently, according to a 2012 interview with Moreno, though Team Sleep has not worked together for some time, they are, in fact, still very much alive. Right now it's just hard finding time for the band between his commitments to the Deftones as well as his newer side project called Crosses.