Sparklehorse - It’s a Wonderful Life

The new album by Sparklehorse is called It’s a Wonderful Life. The brainchild of singer/songwriter Mark Linkous, like Bill Callahan’s similar rock project Smog, Sparklehorse is more an ongoing musical experiment than a band proper.

Linkous wrenches from the depths of his musical psyche dark, difficult, rustic, soundscapes that often sound somnambulant, even funereal. His songs draw together the lo-fi, DIY home recording style currently in vogue in American alternative rock, with the other lo-fi traditional in American music—rural American folk and blues music. Linkous favors obscure surrealism, blending classic American Gothic literary imagery—Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Flannery O’Connor—with the (also literary) haunted, hallucinatory surrealism of Denis Johnson’s novel Jesus’ Son, along with the Beatles of “She Said, She Said,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “A Day in the Life,” and “Strawberry Fields.”

Sparklehorse’s new album, It’s a Wonderful Life, gets its strength from the strangeness of its music, its oldness and its weirdness, its affinity for the spirit of American polymorphic perversity—obsessive love, murder ballads, hellhounds on your trail, what critic Greil Marcus called the “old, weird America.” It’s a strange record. I hear a little of Pavement, Sebadoh, and Smog, Tom Waits, Mercury Rev, some elements of the psychedelic phase of the Beatles and the post-psychedelic Pink Floyd, and some of the older forms of traditional American music.

The album’s instrumentation is eccentric. In addition to the standard guitar and piano, the songs are multi-layered with an indistinct sonic collage of optigan, orchestron, chamberlin, dictaphone, mellotron, moog, prophet 5, korg MS-20, sampler, drum machine, and glockenspiel. Kindred spirits PJ Harvey (“Piano Fire” and “Eyepennies”) and Tom Waits (“Dog Door”) each make appearances. The songs are mostly downbeat, sound ghostly and strange, juxtaposing the beauty of everyday life with bizarre imagery plucked directly, it would seem, from strange dreams and nightmares

Linkous knows a few things about /music/ni.htmares. After a performance in London in 1996, Linkous collapsed in a hotel bathroom after accidentally mixing Valium with prescription antidepressants. He lay there unconscious for nearly 14 hours with his legs pinned beneath his body. The resulting loss of circulation left Linkous nearly crippled. Confined for a time to a wheelchair, it took several surgeries and extensive physical therapy during a 12-week stay at London’s St. Mary’s hospital before he was able to walk again. From the emotional turmoil surrounding these events, Linkous created Good Morning Spider in 1999. For the next Sparklehorse album, Linkous borrows the title of the (now Christmas classic) 1946 Frank Capra/Jimmy Stewart film, a story of a small town man’s fall into despair and redemption through divine intervention and small town virtues, a “celebration of the lives and dreams of America's ordinary citizens, who tried the best they could to do the right thing by themselves and their neighbors,” as Roger Ebert called it.

The film was made immediately after Capra and Stewart returned from service in the armed forces during World War II. It was intended to aid in the postwar reassimilation of the traditional values of small town American life by illustrating that, though the world is fraught with greed, death, guilt, loneliness, loss, and pain (lessons well-learned in WWII, and forces that lived on in the old, weird America), at its truest core, it is indeed a wonderful life. In true classic Hollywood star fashion, Capra’s film has Stewart serve as a stand in—a theatrical mask, if you will—for the typical American *--their imagined set of core values and beliefs of an idealized American—for the character, George Bailey, he was playing in the film, and, finally for Capra himself.

On their version of It’s a Wonderful Life, Sparklehorse appropriates not only the title of Capra’s film, but also Capra’s Jimmy Stewart mask. Linkous has rediscovered what Capra/Stewart/Bailey discovered back in 1946—the mask is not only a mask, but also a shield against the older, weirder America. Sparklehorse tests this mask by plunging it into that other, darker America—the America of murder, suicidal impulse, drug addiction, the want to hate—the same waters George Bailey pondered hurling himself into before stopping (or being stopped, or whatever). Back in 1996, Linkous went ahead and jumped (or slipped, or was pushed, or whatever) and has come back to tell of it. It’s a Wonderful Life is the telling of it.

“I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake/It’s a wonderful life,” Linkous sings on the title track. The music could almost be a lullaby. This is the central theme of the album. Linkous’s lyrics are full of this kind of image. The life in which a dog eats your birthday cake is the very same life that gave you a dog and a birthday cake. All three are wonders. It’s a wonderful life.

--Matt Parks

*It’s worth noting that while most of the particulars mentioned here are American, the cultural forces at work are not necessarily so. For instance, (the film) It’s a Wonderful Life is in large measure a revision of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, so clearly these issues are not a peculiarly American phenomenon. Pink Floyd’s The Wall enters similar territory—the old, weird England—but ends in solipsism, where reassimilation is impossible, or very nearly so.