Aural Fixations

SPARKLEHORSE
It's a Wonderful Life
(Capitol)
What makes an artist? Is it the singleminded pursuit of a creative goal no one else but the artist can see? Perhaps it's the self-confidence required to follow one's own creative instincts regardless of outside scrutiny. Maybe it's the inner knowledge that yes, this way is the right way, even if that way leads up one's own rectum. Arguably, it's all that and more. Mark Linkous, the brains behind the remarkable Sparklehorse, is indubitably an artist. He always follows his own path, no matter how thick the brambles or deep the potholes.

In the 80s he tried following someone else's lead as a member of the Dancing Hoods, an L.A.-based rock/pop band that had one minor hit with the song "Baby's Got Rockets" but went no further down the road to fame and fortune. Tiring of playing the game, Linkous moved back to his native Virginia and drifted in a more personal musical direction. He remains devoted to memorable melodies, but he refuses to let them unfold cleanly. He stretches them, kneads them, reshapes them, then puts them through an often fuzz-encrusted funhouse mirror until they come out twisted into shapes unimagined by anyone except their sculptor. Joined by his trademark imagery-heavy lyrics, seemingly contradictory high tech/low fidelity production and plaintive singing, the songs sound like those of no one else. "Idiosyncratic" and "eccentric" are words that come to mind when describing the music of Sparklehorse, but so are "mesmerizing" and "beautiful."

It's a Wonderful Life is Sparklehorse's third album, following the auspicious debut Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and the widely-hailed Good Morning Spider. Life is Linkous' most low-key album, as well as his most consistently melodic, even, in some spots, tender. Snarling rockers like "Piano Fire" and "King of Nails" forcefully kick down the door and allow stately ballads like "More Yellow Birds" and "Babies On the Sun" to gracefully glide in. Over the ethereal drones of a variety of pre-synthesizer keyboards, Linkous gently croons, "I'm the dog that ate/Your birthday cake/It's a wonderful life" on the wavering, lovely title track. The catchy, winsome "Gold Days" offers "a necklace of leaves" and "spirits in the trees" to "keep all your crows away," adding the sweet admonition "May your days be gold my child," with harmony by the Cardigans' Nina Persson. Other tunes contain references to "fiery pianos," "summer's bleeding veils" and "a child who spoke in tongues/And smelled like sun." "Dog Door," with guest vocals by fellow American Gothic enthusiast Tom Waits, noisily laments that "she got me coming through the dog door" over a clanking found-sound groove, while "Eye Pennies" enlists Polly Jean Harvey to contemplate the time when "the monkeys will fly/And leave me with pennies in my eyes." Love, death, childhood and the inner workings of the natural world swirl in a storm of frizzy feedback and tinny distortion, as Linkous invites the listener to behold his creations, warts and all, with confidence that enhancing the flaws makes his work even more beautiful. (more)

Audio-Visuals

SONIC CINEMA: SPARKLEHORSE
Various directors
(Sundance Channel)
The music video is usually an instrument of promotion, just another commercial for product. The vapidity of the average clip on MTV or VH1 needs no elucidation here. But what happens when you have an artist who resists marketing of any kind, an artist of such singular distinction that a typical video with big-breasted bikini girls or self-conscious surrealism would be akin to forcing a fish to swim in air? You give the artist a budget and let him/her/it do what he wants. Mark Linkous, auteur of Virginia's unclassifiable Sparklehorse, gave eight different directors carte blanche to create any kind of clip they wanted for any of the songs on the 'horse's latest album It's a Wonderful Life. The results are found in the third episode of the Sundance Channel's Sonic Cinema.

It stands to reason that Linkous, a man who never met a straightforward melody he couldn't make crooked, would hand his work over to filmmakers who feel the same way. Hardly anyone here simply shoots footage and presents it without putting it through the wringer in some fashion. A good example is the first piece, made by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin for the record's title track. To match the snap, crackle and pop of the tune, he makes the film stock look authentically old with a barely-in-focus black and white clip filled with early 20th-century imagery, all rotating on a merry-go-round. It's like a freshly discovered silent film created by an eccentric novice. Garine Torossian's piece for "Babies On the Sun" is even stranger and more artificially aged. Torossian uses an elaborate process involving cutting pictures from children's books, filming them on slides, pasting the slides onto 35 mm film on a flatbed, filming them with a video camera as they run, then editing the whole thing on a computer. The finished work is a psychedelic Dick and Jane story set to one of Linkous' prettier melodies. (more)