No yawns at The Big Sleep

The…The Big Sleep, with Minus the Bear and Portugal. The Man Tonight at 7 p.m. Diesel Club Lounge 1601 E. Carson St. 412-431-8800 $17 advance tickets/$19 at the door

When some musicians say, “My life is on the road,” they really just mean that they love to tour. For Danny Barria, guitarist and songwriter of Brooklyn trio The Big Sleep, “My life is on the road” means exactly that.

When he called The Pitt News last week, in fact, he was actually in the middle of ordering lunch from a Rochester, N.Y., drive-through. Not only that, but his wife Sonya Balchandani is the band’s bassist, and the couple just sold their Brooklyn apartment to embark on a multiple-week tour with fellow indie-experimentalists Minus the Bear and Portugal. The Man – a real life on the road, no cheesy metaphor applicable.

“Right now, this is it for me,” he said from the band’s tour van. “I don’t have to pay any bills, I don’t have to get up and go to work in the morning. I’ve been working my whole life to be able to do that. So to just focus on music and do this exclusively is the best thing in the world.”

But it hasn’t always been so great. The Big Sleep had to pay dues in the crowded and competitive New York underground scene before its members could afford such luxuries. The band, composed of Barria and Balchandani, as well as drummer Gabe Rhodes, played around the city with like-minded, but not like-sounding bands before garnering enough attention to warrant national tours with last year’s Son of the Tiger.

“It took us a while. We played as many shows as we could at first and still weren’t getting noticed. When we found our current drummer Gabe, that’s when we really became a rock solid unit,” Barria explained. “We felt we needed to pay a lot of attention to our live show, to make sure that was super, super solid. And it worked – that was our foot in the door.”

To say that bands in The Big Sleep’s circle of friends sound little like them may just be lazy – this trio packs a musical punch unlike most indie waves flowing in and out of the underground. With only a guitar, bass and drums, The Big Sleep play churning, rhythmic, mostly-instrumental and totally-apocalyptic post-rock. And with the newly released Sleep Forever, the band’s sound gets quite a bit bigger with jagged guitar lines under rumbling bass and near-meditative percussion, with only a sprinkling of vocal melodies popping up in assorted places throughout the record.

“A lot of people called the last record a ‘shoegaze’ record, but not at all with this one,” Barria said. “We stripped away some of the atmospherics to leave the three elements – bass, drum and guitar – a little rawer.”

Now on tour, The Big Sleep seem headed in the right direction. But the ultimate goal is to have the band’s income not only support musical endeavors, but also permanently free its members from the nine-to-five doldrums may still be awhile away. After all, all three members, while on hiatus right now, left day jobs waiting for them back in Brooklyn. In fact, if you’re from New York and have computer complications at home this summer, computer technician and rock star Barria may just show up at your door.

For now, though, The Big Sleep members are quite content. Barria, with his wife (“We’re a good team and we know how to work together. Whatever we need to do, we make it work.”) and best friend on the road, can focus on the one thing that gets him like no other – the music, of course.

“There are only three of us, so we’re all essential,” he said. “It’s three people carving out as much musical territory as they can. I love that – we each need to pull our weight and be equals here. And this is all we want to do, to spend time on the music.” And, at least for the moment, grab some lunch. Barria, holding the phone away from his mouth as he shouts into a drive-through window, gets the short stack with eggs and bacon. Currently homeless and jobless but making music, Barria is exactly where he wants to be.