Published reviews of recordings by the late Mark Linkous (Sparklehorse).
From the late monthly publication, Listen Up, based in Rehoboth Beach, Del.:
Sparklehorse
“It’s A Wonderful Life”
Virginian Mark Linkous, the quixotic perpretrator of the usually one-man band, Sparklehorse, continues to struggle with sadness in the new album, It’s A Wonderful Life.
Linkous, whose character in 1999’s Good Morning Spider was “so sick of goodbyes” and longed to be a happy man, seems to be losing the battle.
Wonderful Life is very sad.
But Linkous, who reaches out for the assistance of vocal backings of P. J. Harvey, Nina Persson (of the Cartigans) and, perhaps appropriately, Tom Waits, continues to be compelling.
Here is a man who technically died for two minutes from a prescription drug overdose and continues to be in recovery, whose songs feature curious wordplay and imagery and an odd mixture of sounds (radio static, voice box, phone messages from his mother, children’s voices) and musical instruments, guitars, Wurlitzer, piano, optigan, sampler, vibraphone, harmonium, speak and spell, concertina, percussion & drum machine. What better way to surround lyrics such as “at sunrise the monkeys will fly and leave me with pennies in my eyes?”
No wonder he’s bigger in Europe than in the U.S. Here, he just doesn’t fit in to the commercial formulas, and certainly not into the fragmented categories of music on radio, and, just what could be his niche? Country? Rock? Folk? Way too odd for each of them.
Maybe it’s the demographic of us Odd People, those of us who appreciate distinctive, curious, compelling performers who we don’t quite understand. Kind of the Kristin Hersh School of Music.
Like her recent Sunny Border Blue, which she herself has described as featuring songs that will “bum you out,” Linkous’ narrator struggles with longing to be comfored by a loved one, seems obsessed by a longing for parenthood, and knows that life can be wonderful, but just isn’t sometimes.
But Linkous would likely agree with Hersh. You can’t stop the songs when they come. As she has said, “Songs are big deals, just like kids. You can’t shut them up. You have to accept their syllables if you want to be moved.”
Missing in this mid-tempo outing, his fourth recording since 1996’s Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, is Linkous’ excellent striking electric guitar, which in recording and in live performance, really pulls everything together and can shake the listener.
In It’s A Wonderful Life, the sadness in his voice and lyrics are doing the shaking.
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From AOL’s late online magazine, Critics’ Choice:
From The Best of 1996 ( 2/97}:
Sparklehorse – Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot
This southwestern Virginia group often sounds as if it’s going to fall into pseudo-country twanginess, but avoids going over the ledge with a rock-shock of hard guitar, middle-of-the-night distorted vocals and many oddities, usually expressed through the anguished joy of Mark Linkous’ lyrics about horses, widows and pretty girls milking cows.
From 9/96:
You’ve got to like an album with a love song (“Cow”) that includes the refrain, “Pretty girl milking a cow,” backed by a melancholy electric guitar, a harmonica and a banjo.
Led by Mark Linkous, who was raised in southwestern Virginia, this mostly slow-paced (and acoustic) album, makes references to horses, parasites (who “come crawling in after you die”), cows (of course) and burned-out basements. Not your usual modern-rock subject matter.
The only real rocker here, “Someday I Will Treat You Good,” can stand with the best of the day, but Linkous’ inclination, with his dominant use of a voice box, is toward a dreamy rural sadness.
- Rolf Rykken
