New Sibet 
Slumberhouse (2016)

A modern take on leather chypre.

A lot of people talk about New Sibet that it's a weirdo and they smell goat fur in it. Being quite honest - I don't. To me it's a beautiful, animalic, modern take on the leather chypre and does its job outstandingly. Yes, I do smell quite a lot of animalic notes here - either/or civet/musk to name a few. There are also some flowers. I liked it right away and slowly this is changing into love. One of my favourite Slumberhouse releases for sure.

Slumberhouse fragrances are fetishized in certain parts of the community, so hardly needs no talking up by little old me. But for people who didn't jive with the original aesthetic of Slumberhouse – dense, syrupy New Gothic Americana – and thus allowed their interest to drift away from the house, might be brought back into the fold by New Sibet, a scent that marks a stylistic departure for Josh Lobb and the house.

Underneath the otherworldly chill of orris meeting the gamey funk of leather, New Sibet has a classical bone structure. The gears shift midway through its trajectory, transitioning so soundlessly from Slumberhouse weirdness to a Caronesque leathery carnation that it unnerves the wearer. The dusty coldness that permeates from head to toe gilds the scent with a silvery edge that feels like breathing in dry ice.

New Sibet is unusual in that it exhibits almost human intelligence; sometimes it is a cool-toned, ashy leather, other times it seems rather ripe, buttery, and pungent, and occasionally, it smells resolutely classical, like a beguiling mash-up of Tabac Blond and L'Air du Temps. It's gloriously weird, borderline unwearable, and absolutely beautiful.

If you've followed Slumberhouse's evolution, you'd have seen that the perfumer, Josh Lobb, went through a phase around 2015--2018 that could be described as his "dialed-in" period. Fragrances such as Sixes and Sevens, New Sibet, LANZ, and to some extent the latest iteration of Jeke, seem very focused on singular, or at most a duo of, accords. While previous releases had many moving parts, a lot of smells and ideas circulating and bouncing off of each other at once, this new phase of fragrances pared things down, simplifying, polishing, and compressing the compositions so as to remove any extraneous parts and really hone in on a one or two specific ideas. What resulted were fragrances that seemed more tightly composed, by a defter, more skillful hand that chose polish and finely tuned calibration at the occasional expense of creativity. Simply put, these fragrances were undoubtedly better made, and showed an evolution of the perfumer, but could also be viewed as less interesting or creative in some ways (LANZ however seemed to combine the best of both worlds...and is a true masterpiece, maybe Lobb's best work to date).

Here we have New Sibet: an extremely focused, masterful rendition of the 80's powerhouse base--that unmistakable blend of civet, castoreum, musk, sandalwood, and oakmoss which gave fragrances like Antaeus and Givenchy Gentleman their distinct, manly, hairy-chested depth that pushed on and on long after the top notes wore off. It's a smell that epitomizes an era of pre-IFRA soul-bludgeoning restrictions, mustaches and leisure-suits, and truly masculine masculines. Slumberhouse nailed this classic accord in New Sibet, a scent which briefly smells like an odd, chemical putty before basking in the glory of its 80's-style base notes for the next eight or so hours. And to that end, the fragrance is a success. Anyone who craves these aromas and the memories they may recall would surely find himself satisfied by New Sibet's unapologetic pinpoint execution of its theme. It has it all down to a tee--the depth, the balance, the animalic muskiness in all its right proportions, its amplitude and pitch--nothing is amiss. At the same time, that's where it ends. This is a fragrance without top notes and, you could even argue, without mid notes. There are no pleasing distractions occurring before or during the base's arrival. There are few other sights or sounds to indulge in, off-course tangents to follow, or murky dimensions to get lost in. I've heard New Sibet described abstractly as a "bleak desert," of sorts, and while I don't think its smell reflects a desert, I have to agree that the composition itself is desert-like--flat and unrelenting, and all a similar shade of color until it's almost not a shade of color at all.

Personally, I prefer the busier Slumberhouses--the synesthesia-inducing pastoral labyrinth of Sova, or the sea of drunken red-velvet hues and sultry tones of chocolate that is Zahd, to these hyper-focused, dialed-in exercises of singular themes and accords. Actually I prefer their hybrid, as witnessed in the current version of Pear + Olive (and LANZ) which combines the best of both worlds, leaving us with a super-polished, tightly-woven composition that is ultimately fun and far-reaching as well. New Sibet sits at one end of the extreme, an artistic endeavor no doubt required for Slumberhouse to take its fragrances to the next level, but still, to some extent, a stepping-stone exercise nonetheless, and not what I would ultimately consider one of its grander, more imaginative compositions.