Exuberant. That’s the best way to describe the music of Bowling Green sextet Sleeper Agent.
The band — Tony Smith on guitar and vocals, Alex Kandel on vocals, Justin Wilson on drums, Lee Williams on bass, Scott Gardner on keyboards and Josh Martin on guitars — plays a combustible blend of the sink-or-ascend rock of the Pixies with the sunny pop melodies of a Ronettes-style girl group. The music is garage. It’s pop. It’s rock. It’s boy-girl vocals. It’s high-energy freakouts of the melodic kind.
The band’s “Get It Daddy” is a razor-sharp guitar rhythm, recalling the Strokes, matched with a rapid-fire trampolining rhythm, wiggling synths and Kandel lustily cooing “Ooh, I’m not a baby no more.” The track is peppy and catchy and roisterous.
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Sleeper Agent’s music makes you shake. Or at least tap your foot quickly. “Get Burned” and “Force a Smile” are two more firecrackers, and the band gets Talking Heads New Wave funky on the first half of “Love Blood” before surging with pogo-ing punk rock guitars. (“That’s My Baby” and “All Wave and No Goodbye” slow down the band’s sound with Kandel exhibiting her breathy, yearning vocals on the latter.)
This is what a young band sounds like. A young band up and coming. The band of 20-somethings (Kandel is 19) is big (Rolling Stone named them a Band to Watch last year) and getting bigger, having toured with friends Cage the Elephant and recently playing Coachella.
But the band shrugs off the outside hype and pressure.
“It doesn’t really feel like pressure except for the pressure we put on ourselves,” says Kandel from Bowling Green, where she is enjoying an off day from the road by sleeping in. “I don’t really feel that much outside pressure. I’m just so into what’s next and what’s the next step and what’s the greater goal. This is our job, and we take it really seriously, but I’m still doing what I absolutely love. To me it just seems like a natural progression, and I know we get a lot of great support from our fans.”
Smith (the band’s chief songwriter) and Wilson started the band with Wilson on vocals in 2008, and discovered Kandel working in a local coffee shop the next year. But Kandel wasn’t originally pegged as the group’s co-vocalist; she was the band’s bass player. Kind of. But a too-big instrument and too-small hands transitioned Kandel into her current position.
With the other three members in place by early 2010, Sleeper Agent (it’s a Battlestar Galactica reference) started. Soon producer Jay Joyce, who was producing Cage the Elephant’s second record, heard a Sleeper Agent demo and called the band. Before long Sleeper Agent was recording their debut album Celabrasion in July 2010. The album was released digitally last August and then in hard copy form in September, but by that time the band was already a sensation.
“It’s not pressure like we want to be this big, huge band and so-and-so magazine said this about us, but it’s more we want to make the next great album so our fans are happy,” Kandel says. “That’s where the pressure comes from. I just don’t want to let down the people who support us.”
Part of that support is in their hometown of Bowling Green. The city of roughly 60,000 (plus the students of Western Kentucky University) might seem like the most unlikely of music meccas. But in the past few years a number of buzz-worthy rock bands have emerged from the city. Besides Sleeper Agent, there is also Cage the Elephant, a live-wired rock group and the most famous of all Bowling Green acts, and other bands such as Morning Teleportation.
“Everyone knows everyone,” says Kandel of the Bowling Green musical community. “Everyone is very supportive of each other. There’s not too many bands so you don’t get lost. It seems as though everyone has been in everyone’s bands already.”
It has all happened so fast for Sleeper Agent but yet it really hasn’t happened though. Sleeper Agent is still becoming. Not established. Kandel and the band know it. Each show, each night, each new audience is an opportunity. Sleeper Agent is proving its worth every night. Proving it with a jubilant sound that sunnily stomps with big hooks and backyard sing-along choruses.
“I love everything about this,” Kandel says. “I get to play music every night. That’s what I do. That is still mind-blowing.
“We are still working to build our own audience. We have one and that’s great. It’s still a process of doing the hard work to be able to tour and build an audience.”