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Mar 29, 2022 Web Exclusive By Hayden Merrick

Mid-century cinema is one of Cristina Peck’s muses. Aside from naming Crisis Actor’s lead single after William Dieterle’s whimsical 1948 rags-to-riches tale Portrait of Jennie, the vocalist/guitarist shares commonalities with Rear Window’s protagonist Jeff Jefferies (James Stewart). Both were confined to their rooms: Jeff with a busted leg, Peck with COVID. Both beguiled the hours by surveying the view out the window. And both linked up fragments in order to solve a puzzle. Rather than the murder of her neighbor, Cristina’s puzzle was Sandman Sleeps’ debut album, a kinetic art rock painting a decade in the making.

Crisis Actor is a coalescence of particles—fever dreams, the cogency of nature, an ailing relationship. Likewise its instrumentation collages disparate founts. The vocals vacillate between an Ellie Roswell-esque mumble and a Kate Bush-ian bawl. Drums push and pull, gripping the other instruments by the scruff. Shards of guitar either lock and click like the inner workings of a bank vault or coast coolly above the Pacific. Then there’s the bass, played by Cristina’s sister Alex. Rubbery and determined, it drives many of the arrangements, the two women locked in sibling synergy.

But back to Peck’s quarantine view. Overlooking Florida’s Intercoastal Waterway, the static frame of a window—its restrictions and liberties—pervades the lyrics, such as on “Spiral” when she whispers, “Outside drifted parts of me.” Her imagination carries her only so far: a part, her body, remains tacked to reality, to the seat beneath her. (“This is not my body/And it’s not my badge of beliefs,” she sings elsewhere.) A synthesizer reinforces this imagery, flickering like the lights of a cockpit control panel.

“I try to reach you/Chase you out with the sun,” goes one line from the moody “Opaque.” It’s Peck’s attempt to tether herself to nature as she wishes for an extension beyond her four repressive walls, using the sun to orient the album. It’s her lodestar, as evidenced from the very first lyric: “I am soaked in light/I hope it cures me.” Phrases like this start to pick at something bigger, a well of feeling that cannot be wholly tapped at the time. Perhaps it’s the COVID fatigue; perhaps the light is enough for now. (www.sandmansleeps.com)

Author rating: 6.5/10