Unheralded, this disc made its way to my stereo by coincidence and has held it captive for a week now. From the first strains of “Homecoming Queen” it is apparent there is something different about this band. What begins as a gently picked acoustic song becomes creepier with the addition of eerie, harmonizing keyboard notes, a tape loop of an organ grinder/carousel(?), and a vocal that sounds like it could have been called in from a payphone. The first thing that came to mind was a country/folk Flaming Lips, but that’s too small a pigeonhole for this unique project.
Sparklehorse, on record, is mostly the brainchild of Virginia native Mark Linkous, who is credited with guitar, bass, drums, echoharp, banjo, tapes, chord organ, mellotron, land camera, duct tape, and size 11 Red Wings on the record. He also produced most of the record as well, with help from David Charles. Linkous plays all the instruments on about 1/3 of the songs and enlists the help of several guests – including Charles, Bob Rupe, Armstead Welleford, and Johnny Hott – on others.
Although there 4-5 mid to up-tempo songs on the record of subtleties and “feel”, a record that makes for interesting headphone listening and provides the listener with the ongoing opportunity to uncover more upon repeated listens. Linkous leaves plenty of space to apply broad impressionistic strokes of words, emotions, answering machine messages, or whatever else happens to strike his fancy. His vocals are often whispered, slightly distorted, and can be frequently found uttering obtuse non-sequiters such as: “Hey little dog, can you fly / Hammering the cramps” and ” I want my records back / And that motorcycle gas tank that I spray-painted black / The owls have been talking to me / but I’m sworn to secrecy”, but I’ll be darned if I can stop singing these melodious phrases! Some songs would even qualify as poetry, such as the wonderful, haunting “Spirit Ditch” with its chorus “Woke up in a burned-out basement / Sleeping with metal hands / In a spirit ditch”.
But Linkous is also capable of semi-straightforward storytelling, as in the Vic Chesnutt-esque “Most Beautiful Widow In Town”, where he talks of standing in his girlfriends mothers living room “sweating up a storm in that terrible month of June”, then realizes “…this musta been dream, cuz your mother would never let me in her house”.
Other standout tracks include “Wierd Sisters” (“The parasites will love you / when you’re dead / la, la-la, la-la” ), the banjo-driven , feedback splattered epic, “Cow”, and the beautiful, heartbreaking in its brevity, “Heart of Darkness”, with its bittersweet pedal steel. All told, a record very worthy of checking out. It’ll be interesting to see what twists and turns lie ahead for this man/band.