Daniel Johnston / Mark Linkous – Fear Yourself
Take two famously off-kilter rock songwriters, give them a band and access to a world of gear, and shut them up in a studio for four days. It’s almost ridiculous to suggest the outcome could be predictable or even dull, but this collaboration between Daniel Johnston and Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous is just that.
The disc does open with a neat trick. The rudimentary lead track, “Now”, scratches out of the speakers in foggy lo-fi, just like Johnston’s early homemade tapes, then bleeds into “Syrup Of Tears”. Suddenly, the fog lifts to reveal the bubbly layers of Linkous’ backing like a Day-Glo dawn. A nifty novelty, it’s also the album’s most engaging moment.
Johnston wrote these dozen songs; unsurprisingly, they’re all about the power of love and how much it sucks to be without it. He unleashes some memorable lines, most of them comical (“Along came a girl/Like a spider,” “I’ll dream of her for a thousand years/Until I see another girl”), but never sustains a lyrical thread to match his much-covered “Speeding Motorcycle”, “True Love Will Find You In the End”, or “Some Things Last A Long Time”. Then there’s Johnston’s singing, which veers, of course, from endearing to tolerable to simply bad.
Heavy on wheezing organs and synthetic strings, too many songs — mostly the down-tempo numbers — sound like nothing more or less than Daniel Johnston on piano with Sparklehorse Lite. The pair fares better when they rock out, as in the ragged, ringing pop of “Fish” and the crackling “Love Not Dead”.
Finally, and inescapably, there’s the prickly matter of whether Johnston is just a sideshow. Even if you’re agnostic on the questions of exploitation that hound the world of outsider art, it’s easy to feel unsettled listening to these songs, and not hard to imagine certain lyrics as Johnston’s response to gawking fans. “Would you follow me anywhere?” he asks in “Love Enchanted”. “Are you entertained by deep despair?”