Patrick Park: Loneliness Knows My Name

Patrick Park
Loneliness Knows My Name
Hollywood Records

Patrick Park reminds me of Jesus. Okay, not really. But after browsing clips that drop his name alongside the likes of Lennon, Young, Tweedy, Dylan, Parsons, Drake, and--most often--Elliott Smith and Ryan Adams, I figured every other tousled, revered white dude had already been cited. That's heady company for anyone, much less the utterly unseasoned Park, whose complete discography consists of his recent EP Under the Unminding Skies (Badman), a batch of demos he circulated and briefly sold at gigs last year, and now Loneliness Knows My Name. But I've seen Park play twice--two solo sets in which he confronted indifferent, noisy crowds with just a guitar and harmonica--and each time he displayed great prowess for finger-picking and harp-huffing, not to mention a powerful but controlled vocal dynamism.

Those same skills saturate Loneliness, an 11-cut collection of recrimination and anti-love songs set to melodies so big, broad, and undeniable that they're almost manipulative. Whether confessing his own failures in "Something Pretty" ("At the most, I'm a glare/I'm the hopeless son who's hardly there") or condemning someone else for theirs in "Your Smile's a Drug" ("When you say you're in love/You just sound like you're giving up"), the effect of Park's easy falsetto caressing a line or his rich, rangy tenor rising over a wave of strings makes feeling bad sound awfully good. He also boasts a poet's knack for alliterative lines, like the "tongue-tied talker with sleepy eyes" in "Your Smile's a Drug," or this couplet from "Past Poisons": "If you want me, you know where I'll be/Putting past poisons gently to sleep."

Although the allusions to the guilt-pop pantheon are hyperbolic, they do function as shorthand to describe Park's attributes: He's a supple-voiced singer and an accomplished six-string player with an ambitious vision of pop that's at once folk-inflected, soulful, and innately catchy--plus he's a shaggy, brooding, doe-eyed hottie backed by a major label's brawn. Bigger than Jesus? Nah, but he's got a shot at stardom.