A Sleep Party People performance can easily come across as the musical equivalent of a psychoanalyst's case study. When Danish multi-instrumentalist Brian Batz takes the stage with his 5-piece live band, they all wear the band's signature white rabbit masks, which evokes a child's innocence and imaginative potential alongside a sense of strange (yet harmless) abjection. The music, a genre-blending mix of dream pop and off-kilter electronica, is often dark, eerie and haunting - but in a non-menacing and vaguely therapeutic manner.
"Fainting Spells", a track from Sleep Party People's sophomore album Lingering (2017), takes the idea of performative childhood trauma to new heights. Batz finds poetic justice in turning "his weakness for broken instruments" into art, by using an old battered piano that was out of tune and missing some strings to create a distinctive piano loop that arrests your attention each time you hear it. Anchored by Ice Cream Cathedral's Anders Bach on drums, Batz's delicate and airy falsetto proffer a character sketch of childhood anxiety and dysfunction: 'You're feeling/ I feel off/ The unknown/ A fainting spell appears/ Vertigo/ Tongue-tied/ Tongue-tied'.
Batz has explained the autobiographical inspiration for the track in a press release: “The lyrics are about being the quiet boy in class and how dreadful it was for me to even speak out loud during class. I almost fainted every time I had to walk up to the blackboard and speak in front of everyone, because I was so terrified to fail or not deliver what was expected of me. Now I dwell much more in the person I have become although I’m still not a fan of being the centre of attention and speaking in front of a class. But I guess you get better at those things as you get older.”
The song echoes his conclusion. Instead of providing a sense of closure or resolution to this specter of crippling self-doubt, it encourages a rarified familiarity and acceptance of unease.
