Track of the Day: SLEEP PARTY PEOPLE – ‘The Missing Steps’

Track of the Day: SLEEP PARTY PEOPLE - ‘The Missing Steps’
photo-credit:Dennis-Morton)

Sleep Party People are sharing the video for new single ‘The Missing Steps’, the first track to emerge from new album Lingering, due out June 2 2017 through Joyful Noise Recordings. Written, recorded, produced and performed entirely by Danish multi-instrumentalist Brian Batz, Lingering – featuring collaborations with The Antlers’ Peter Silberman & Air vocalist Beth Hirsch – is Sleep Party People’s fourth studio album, and the first release since 2014’s Floating. Watch the new video for ‘The Missing Steps’ BELOW.

A fragile, blissful love song buoyed by a DIY gospel choir (comprised of fellow Copenhagen artists Irah, CODY, Hymns From Nineveh, Disa and Luster), ‘The Missing Steps’ finds Batz trading in classic SPP uplift, with a pacy, fuzzed-up drum beat liberated from personal Revolver highlight, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. The track’s startlingly beautiful Christina Amundsen-directed video blurs the lines between mythology and the future, the mortal & the supernatural. Amundsen says; “I was partially inspired by Mount Olympus and the old Greek Gods, but also my newfound fascination with cryopreservation. The video captures two people becoming stone, preserving their bodies together in a mountain in the hope they could be brought back to life together. The ultimate love.”

Though Copenhagen-based Batz & his 5-piece live band have become synonymous with the rabbit masks they wear during Sleep Party People live performances, Lingering finds Batz shedding his guard to create some of the most personal and accessible material of his career. Whilst ‘The Missing Steps’ and other moments on Lingering engage demonstrably with bliss (also the woozy, unhurried not-quite title track, ‘Lingering Eyes’), it is nonetheless a record also concerned with anxiety and doubt, and the ways in which we cope with those insecurities that can persist through adulthood.

A personal high-water mark for Batz from Lingering is the appearance of Air-collaborator Beth Hirsch, who guests on ‘We Are There Together’. A longstanding fan of classic album Moon Safari, he was left tongue-tied when Hirsch contacted him out of the blue, seeking out a collaboration. Whilst Lingering is enriched by several such artistic collaborations – with The Antlers’ Peter Silberman also providing choir arrangements on ‘Dissensions’ – it is equally shaped by Batz’s famously eccentric collection of instruments. ‘Salix And His Soil’ came about when Batz bought an old organ; “When I turned the organ on for the first time, it started playing this crazy fast Super Mario Brothers-ish beat and loop by itself. I got hooked straight away and started jamming along”. Elsewhere, ‘Fainting Spell’ rests entirely on a piano loop played out on the snapped wires of his battered old studio piano.

On Lingering’s album-closer ‘Vivid Dream’, Batz sings of ‘Beating down my own door. Aiming to be flawless and without any mistakes’. Flawed or otherwise, in Lingering, he has unmistakably created a thing of stark beauty.

Track listing
Figures
The Missing Steps
Fainting Spell
Salix and His Soil
Lingering Eyes
Dissensions (feat. Luster)
Limitations
The Sound Of His Daughter
The Sun Will Open Its Core
We Are There Together (feat. Beth Hirsch)
Odd Forms
Vivid Dream

Xsnoize Author
Mark Millar is the founder of XS Noize and looks after the daily running of the website as well as hosting interviews for the weekly XS Noize Podcast. Mark's favourite album is Achtung Baby by U2.

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