Sparklehorse - The turmoil of the solitary mr. Linkous

If it's true that the Nineties were fertile ground for the emergence of great singer-songwriters, Mark Linkous stands as one of the most graceful shoots of that era. Mr. Sparklehorse managed to combine the depth, intellectual rigor, and intimate attitude of the greatest songwriters in history (from Neil Young to Will Oldham) with the dynamism of a rock band (a bit like Elliot Smith, Jeff Buckley and Jeremy Egnik did); it's as if Neil Young were fronting the Replacements.

The Sparklehorse project was born in Richmond, Virginia around the mid-Nineties, and Linkous's crystalline talent was immediately apparent on one of the first singles, "Hammering the cramps" (a close relative of Guided by Voices' "Wished I was a giant"), a superb melody completely immersed in a riot of distorted guitars, with Linkous's voice filtered yet delightfully harmonious.

Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is one of the most interesting works of a second half of the Nineties utterly dazzled by electronica and britpop. One after another, a series of melodic gems unfold, stylistically different yet united by a common thread of melancholy. We're not in the presence of early Radiohead's despair or the epic resignation of Red House Painters, but of a less explicit emotion; a suffering displayed with discretion, yet incredibly intense. The lyrics are often eccentric, just as often proceeding through metaphor, but they reveal a pain that Linkous tries to exorcise by reconciling it with the flow of everyday events.

"Homecoming Queen" is an anguished piece, sung in a near-whisper, which immediately signals the mood of the record. "Weird sisters" is a funereal ballad that harks back to the Neil Young of "Tonight's the night", while the melancholic "Cow" sounds as if it stepped straight out of "Harvest". The psychedelic "Heart of darkness" starts out as a love song ("she laid her head on my chest/ as the sun burned on the west"), but ends as a nightmare ("then she woke up into the fire/ and the flames kept dancing higher/satan would laugh at her screams/then she woke up from her dreams"); Linkous's sentimentalism is grafted onto narrative structures drawn from Southern gothic. "Saturday" and "Spirit ditch" are more ballads, but moving ones, sung with the heart on the sleeve. The record also features excellent power-pop songs, as "Rainmaker" demonstrates. "Tears on fresh fruit" wouldn't have been out of place on Husker Du's "Warehouse: songs and other stories", and neither would "Someday I will treat you good". Linkous draws liberally from his own influences, but he doesn't get a single song wrong; a flawless record.

In 1996, following a show in London, Linkous nearly died after ingesting a cocktail of drugs. For several months he would be confined to a wheelchair.

Good Morning Spider inevitably bears the mark of that experience. The songs are still sad, but at the same time even more pop-leaning. "Sick of goodbyes" (co-written with David Lowery and also featured on Cracker's "Kerosene hat") and "Maria's little elbows" could belong in the Beatles' catalogue. Linkous seems to want to let the audience in on the experience he lived through, so he packs the songs with melody to make them easier to absorb. The most notable new feature of the record, though, is the use — and often overuse — of electronics. Many songs are transfigured by synthetic sounds, which undermines the depth of the message Linkous is trying to convey; "Ghost of his smile" is emblematic in this sense.

Even on this record, though, there's no shortage of energetic tracks, like the driving "Pig" and "Chaos Of Galaxy/ Happy Man", where the electric guitar finally reclaims its central role. The good songs aren't lacking in inspiration either, but it's the form, not the content, that undercuts the record's overall worth.

2000 saw the release of the EP Distorted Ghost, featuring b-sides and live versions of tracks from the previous albums.

With It's A Wonderful Life, Sparklehorse returns to top form, aided on this occasion by an exceptional cast. Rallying to Linkous's bedside are, among others, Nina Persson (Cardigans), PJ Harvey and none other than his majesty Tom Waits; some songs are also the result of Linkous-Parish and Linkous-Fridmann co-productions. The album seems to finally strike the perfect balance between rock and electronics (never as intrusive as on the previous record).

Once again, Linkous draws on multiple sources of inspiration, just as the songs are wrapped in multiple styles. The record opens with "It's a wonderful life", a whispered lullaby in the vein of "Homecoming Queen", while "Gold days" sounds as if it emerged straight from the Eels' dramatic "Electroshock Blues". Take a Neil Young song and speed it up, and what you get is something close to Dinosaur Jr.; "King of nails" and "Piano fire" (where P.J. Harvey's vocal contribution is spine-chilling) perfectly fulfill that axiom. The album's masterpiece is perhaps "Apple bed", a superb Arab Strap-style ballad, where guitar, drum machine and violin blend to perfection. Linkous hands the vocal reins to Tom Waits on "Dog door", a track cut from the same cloth as "Big in Japan" from Mule Variations (one of Waits's masterpieces).

After the Pomona master's frenzied turn, calm returns with "More Yellow Birds", a melancholic ballad elevated by a magnificent violin melody, in the style of Lisa Germano. The record is a treasure trove, like the closing "Babies on the sun", and Linkous confirms himself as one of the most creative songwriters of our time, infinitely more sincere than certain postmodern (pseudo)singer-songwriters who grace the covers of specialist magazines and beyond.

A Camp is a forgettable collaboration between Linkous and Nina Persson of the Cardigans.

With the following album, Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain, Mark Linkous doesn't shift the turmoil of his solitude one inch, he simply humanizes it, soothes it and shares it, even more than in the past. He embraces all the wonderful parts of 2001's life and, starting with the title itself, stamps the record with the mark of dreamlike, sensational nights, those spent with one eye closed in reverie and the other looking around. We are indeed far from the noisy pile-ups of the first record, but the new world doesn't forget, all the more so, the childlike use of a voice ever more "Harvest-oriented" and the ribless musical skeleton. What changes is the more relaxed way of savoring an event that's never short on beauty, like that of "Shade And Honey", a moment brimming with double-faced instants, between false grayness and classic openings that use the incoming guitar chord as their key. The air doesn't change, similar to what you breathe among toymakers at Christmas, as the outpourings of "Getting It Wrong" recall, another handkerchief of feverish, fairy-tale states.

Sparklehorse is the name that marks the steady pace of its marches, as made clear by certain rhythms that are often identical to themselves. A single drum tempo within which to feel at ease, provided you adapt to its accelerations. And bouncing off these false metamorphoses are the many melodies, sweet even in their aggression, like "Ghost In The Sky": the strumming is noisy but not excessively so, and irritation practically never surfaces, not even when the ending unfurls an industrial "bell" in the background. Further on, with "It's Not So Hard", the clamor repeats itself with even more disturbed frequencies. The tracks become adorable when they come together around the electric strumming of "Knives Of Summertime", or that of "See The Light", albeit in a less cascading form, or around the acoustic strumming of "Return To Me".

The closing title track deserves separate mention, an anomalous ambient digression that seems to address fans of "Another Green World" (Brian Eno) and "Bad Timing" (Jim O'Rourke), tracing a seminal furrow in Mark Linkous's short history.

In 2009, meanwhile, Linkous took part in Danger Mouse's bizarre project Dark Night Of The Soul.

The story of Sparklehorse came to a tragic end on March 6, 2010, plunging friends and fans into grief. Mark Linkous, who had struggled with depression for years, took his own life, shooting himself in the heart outside a friend's house in Knoxville, Tennessee. His family would remember him with a touching epitaph: "It is with great sadness that we share the news that our dear friend and relative has taken his own life. We are grateful for the time he spent with us and will always keep him in our hearts. May his journey be peaceful, happy and free. There is a heaven, and there's a star up there for you."

When this happened, a new album was already in the works, with the title and tracklist decided and much of the material well underway. Naturally everything came to a halt and was left in limbo, at least until September 8 of this year, exactly one day before what would have been his sixty-first birthday.

After thirteen years, Bird Machine (2023) is finally ready for release, bringing back one last time the chiaroscuro enchantment lavished by the American musician. It only takes a few seconds of the opening "It Will Never Stop" to find him again, to return to the distorted electricity of "Pig" and the power pop of "Rainmaker", to sink once more into a sound world made of sweeping melodies, a lo-fi attitude built with obsessive precision, and words of suffering and nostalgia offered with disarming sincerity. As the album unfolds, it's at times startling just how much the finishing work overseen by his brother Matt together with his wife Melissa — with the collaboration of Alan Weatherhead, Joel Hamilton and Greg Calbi — managed to produce an album free of stylistic rough edges, perfectly consistent with that creative arc which led from the unmatched rawness of Vivadixiesubmarine transmissionplot to the pop-leaning sound of Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain.

What we get to hear is, to all intents and purposes, a finished, carefully polished album, far removed from similar productions built along different lines — just think, when it comes to posthumous records by highly emotional singer-songwriters, of the bare-bones sketches of "Eight Gates" by Jason Molina.

We'll never know whether this would have been its definitive shape in Linkous's hands, but "Evening Star Supercharger" and "Everybody's Gone To Sleep" have the quality and depth of the best Sparklehorse ballads, just as the dreamlike elegy of "Falling Down" and "The Skull Of Lucia" can break your heart as thoroughly as a new "Saturday". Any reasonable doubt surrounding such an operation is nonetheless swept away by the irrepressible joy of a gift as beautiful as it is unexpected, yet another treasure chest of precious songs conceived — and there's no doubt about this — by an artist incapable of compromise ("Well I coulda been a rock and roll star/ But I fucked it up real good", he sings in "I Fucked It Up"), leaving us at the mercy of a glimmer of hope that wasn't enough to save him.

Contributions by Angelo Franzese ("Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain") and Peppe Trotta ("Bird Machine")

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