The Sleeper

Sydney producer/songwriter Caitlin Park’s second album is full of innovative ideas achieved via unusual methods. Yet they sound natural and effortless, writes EDWARD SHARP-PAUL.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] One gets pretty used to the bold-new-chapters, the great-leap-forwards and coming-of-ages that populate the breathless rhetoric of music journalism. Such clichés mean a little less every time they are used, but I mean it when I say that all are apt in the case of Caitlin Park – at the very least, the coming-of-age bit applies. Her second album, The Sleeper, builds on the promising, introverted Milk Annual, and positively exudes Significant Album qualities from its every metaphorical pore.

The first thing that one notices, from the opening lines of ‘Wake Up in a Whirr’, is the leap in confidence. On Milk Annual, Park created pieces that were halfway between song and sound collage, beguiling but studied. On The Sleeper, that balance skews: the constructions are still wildly imaginative, but the elements of collage are no longer scaffolding – but rather ornamentation.

Those elements – Park’s percussive acoustic guitar playing, snatches of dialogue, field recordings, string noise, and, increasingly, synthetic sounds – still pay a heavy debt to The Books, but as the other aspects of Park’s aesthetic receive greater emphasis, the effect becomes less obtrusive. Park’s understated songcraft now rules the roost.

“She covers a lot of ground, drawing out latent aspects of the songs without ever sounding like anyone but herself.”

It’s probably no coincidence that this shifted emphasis happens as Park’s earthen, double-tracked alto comes to the fore. Where previously Park was an almost apologetic singer, too worried about knocking over some rococo furniture to draw attention in her own right, The Sleeper is full of quietly commanding performances.

On ‘Hold Your Gaze’ she is disarming, offering safe harbour to a prospective lover. ‘Lemonade’, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically suave, with Park playing up to the almost doo-wop feel of the accompaniment that she has painstakingly constructed. She is completely exposed on ‘Where I Slept’, with only a subterranean synth drone and some looped vocals for company. In short, she covers a lot of ground, drawing out latent aspects of the songs without ever sounding like anyone but herself.

Of course, none of this would count for all that much if The Sleeper didn’t carry such a strong thematic focus. The sleeper of the album’s title is a figure of intrigue, a perfect, unknowable savant, effortlessly intimate, freed from the burdens of yearning, loss and things-going-wrong-ness, the burdens that consume us in our conscious hours. Park uses the sleeper as a perfect Other, an embodiment of our desire for even a temporary escape from our tangled selves.

This Other hovers over the album, as Park contemplates the burdens of wakefulness. Even with the conceptual frame, Park’s musings might grow tired (sorry) if she didn’t possess such a knack for exposing the accidental truths contained in tiny gestures and stray thoughts. Better yet, she matches these emotional fragments with similarly fragmented sounds, heightening the sense of these songs not as dioramas, but as peepholes into private worlds. She sings of children that are yet to be born, from a relationship that is yet to be consummated (‘Hunt for the Young’), and of kites, graves, peacocks, and possibly even Icarus (‘Not the Light’). As one might imagine, the title track is the centrepiece, in which Park lists the many qualities of her Other, painting a less than generous self-portrait via this negative exposure.

As with everything Park does, The Sleeper is full of innovative ideas achieved via unusual methods – methods that nonetheless sound natural and effortless in her gifted hands. She has found the framework and the performances to do justice to her wildly inventive constructions.

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‘The Sleeper’ is out now on CD and digitally through Create/Control. Launch dates below. Read Park’s Track by Track for the album.

Fri, July 11 – The Vanguard, Sydney, NSW
Fri, Aug 1 – Bella Union, Melbourne, VIC
Sat, Aug 2 – The Hive, Brisbane, QLD [all ages]