Sparklehorse discography (1995-2010) [mp3]@320kbps (+ep's)

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Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot [1995]

108MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
# "Homecoming Queen" ? 3:36
# "Weird Sisters" ? 5:00
# "850 Double Pumper Holley" ? 0:36
# "Rainmaker" ? 3:47
# "Spirit Ditch" ? 3:24
# "Tears on Fresh Fruit" ? 2:08
# "Saturday" ? 2:27
# "Cow" ? 7:05
# "Little Choo Choo" ? 0:47
# "Hammering the Cramps" ? 2:49
# "Most Beautiful Widow in Town" ? 3:19
# "Heart of Darkness" ? 1:52
# "Ballad of a Cold Lost Marble" ? 0:45
# "Someday I Will Treat You Good" ? 3:42
# "Sad & Beautiful World" ? 3:33
# "Gasoline Horseys" ? 2:40

Review:
Shivering in the Shadows

Mark Linkous had a long rock'n'roll history before arriving at his debut Sparklehorse LP. He'd fronted Replacements-esque rockband Dancing Hoods for much of the '80s, presiding over two albums written in hopes of having a hit. There are traces of that old working way on Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot, the first record he issued since going 'solo' under the Sparklehorse name. Tracks like "Hammering the Cramps," "Rainmaker," and, of course, mid-'90s buzz-bin anthem "Someday I Will Treat You Good," all stack on crunchy multi-track'd guitars and punch out instantly-memorable, shout-along choruses.

Whilst those songs may've been the most noticed ?in a broad, pop-cultural sense? upon Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot's 1995 release, they were the quickest to fade. They weren't the reason why Sparklehorse attracted a cult following; why icons like Radiohead, PJ Harvey, and Tom Waits became fans, friends, and collaborateurs; why this album resonated for years thereafter, eventually becoming a fitting eulogy for Linkous's profound talents when he committed suicide in 2010.

Dwelling quietly in the shade of the LP's alt-rock anthems are a collection of strange, sad, small songs; tiny tunes that've slipped through the cracks; fractured lullabies in which Linkous's faltering, hesitant voice is pushed forward, naked and shivering. Compositionally, the tunes are bare bones ?skeletal guitar, occasionally drumbeats or keyboard adornments? but rich in spirit: Linkous creating opaque atmospheres with whirring tape noise, crackling radio static, and ghostly samples.
And That's Called 'Sad'

In the evocative "Spirit Ditch," in which a trio of guitars waltz around Linkous's double-tracked whispers (which intone strange, ad-hoc-poetic lines like "if I had a home/you'd know it'd be/in a slide trombone"), the veritable 'bridge' comes in the form of an answering machine message, in which an aunt details a bad dream she had; her voice sounding distant, disembodied, and eerie.

On the album's epilogue, "Gasoline Horseys," Linkous sings through a vintage microphone that makes his voice seem small and distant ?the classic through-a-toilet-roll vocal? but he pushes the old-timey sound further with drifting flickers of radio static. Even when the song 'pushes' forward in a neat bit of Wizard of Oz-shifts-to-technicolor productional flourish, the extra oomph in fidelity only brings Linkous closer; never makes him bombastic. With an ever-increasing amount of echo swallowing his voice, he blithely sings "yes, your hair smells like sunshine today/gasoline horseys will take us away" over the doleful strums, and the album trickles to an end.

It's a fittingly-sad ending to an album that ?anthemic alt-rock numbers notwithstanding? is rife with sadness. Recorded, often by himself, on a rural Virginia farm, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot is steeped in isolationism and, seemingly, depression. Tender tunes like "Homecoming Queen" and "Most Beautiful Widow in Town" are lovelorned and lachrymose; odes to loves lost and never-had.

And then there's the LP's defining track, one that would go onto become, for many, the encapsulate Linkous's music: "Sad & Beautiful World." As is often the way, it's the simplest, most direct song that sticks. Whilst its opening couplet ?"sometimes I get so sad/sometimes you just make me mad"? reads like a rudimentary-rhyming joke in the cold light of syntax, hearing Linkous tenderly intone every syllable, in a barely-there, 4AM whisper, it sounds like a simple truism profound in its elementalism.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/396908599/Sparkle-Sparkle-unpronouncablename.rar


Chords I've Known EP [1996]

22.6MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "Heart of Darkness (Wiggly)" ? 2:07
2. "Almost Lost My Mind" ? 1:41
3. "Midget in a Junkyard" ? 1:22
4. "Dead Opera Star" ? 1:58
5. "The Hatchet Song" ? 2:42

Review:
Excellent songs like "Dead Opera Star" and "Midget in a Junkyard" make you realise that some of the other songs are a bit more 'throwaway' and not as well developed. But hey, it's an EP of non-LP songs. Thats what you should expect. Necessary for the hardcore Sparklehorse fan. Others can probably get by with their full length CD's.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/399101910/Sparkle-Sparkle-ch0rd51v3kn0wn.rar

Good Morning, Spider [1998]

128MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "Pig" ? 2:22
2. "Painbirds" ? 3:50
3. "Saint Mary" ? 3:59
4. "Good Morning Spider" ? 1:09 (Linkous, Scott Minor, Sofia Mitchalitsianos)
5. "Sick of Goodbyes" ? 3:32 (Linkous, David Lowery)
6. "Box of Stars (Part One)" ? 0:33
7. "Sunshine" ? 4:59
8. "Chaos of the Galaxy/Happy Man" ? 4:31
9. "Hey, Joe" ? 3:04 (Daniel Dale Johnston)
10. "Come on In" ? 3:43
11. "Maria's Little Elbows" ? 4:16
12. "Cruel Sun" ? 2:25
13. "All Night Home" ? 3:43
14. "Ghost of His Smile" ? 3:11
15. "Hundreds of Sparrows" ? 2:26
16. "Box of Stars (Part Two)" ? 0:49
17. "Junebug" ? 3:24

Review:
I can just imagine the looks on the suits faces when Sparklehorse brought the tapes for this album into the studio offices of Capitol Records. While there are some songs that could possibly be considered singles, for the most part the album is a very strange, lo-fi journey through tons of different styles and some amazing instrumentation and experimentation.

If I'd have to mention an album that it kind of reminded me of, I'd say that it works in a lot of the same ways as Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea. There's a dramatic amount of different instrumentation used over the course of the disc, as well as lots of different styles tried out in terms of song structure and sound. Like that afformentioned album, most of the different styles not only work, but work well.

The first track on the disc starts out a bit misleading with a quiet little strum of guitar and some falsetto singing, but changes up gears quickly with a strange little spoken voice. It rifles into a junky-sounding rock track with distorted vocals and a wall of driving guitar sound. It quickly drops down into something decidingly more mellow and mixes right into the decidingly slower second and third tracks. The third one, entitled "Saint Mary," is one of the best songs on the album with its stripped-bare sensibility and affected vocals. It moves along with a simple acoustic guitar, little touches of piano, and vocals that sound like a constant struggle just to be emitted. The soft focus video (which is included on the disc) of Linkous drifting under shimmering water provides nearly the perfect imagery for the track.

Things get a little more upbeat again on the fifth track "Sick Of Goodbyes." It's a nice, southern-rock sounding track that has enough infectious energy to make you want to stomp your foot along with it. Co-written and produced by David Lowery (of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven fame), it's easy to see the influence. One song that gets a bit out-of-hand with the low-fi effects is the eighth track entitled "Chaos Of The Galaxy/Happy Man." For nearly the first half of the track, it sounds like it's coming in on a cheap transistor radio, until finally the dial spins and picks things up full force for the finale. It's a good track, but it almost feels muddled a bit too long.

I can't even begin to emphasize how many great slow, ballad-like songs there are on the album. When Linkous strips things down to only 2 or 3 instruments and vocals, it works amazingly almost every time from "Hey Joe," to "Come On In," to "Hundreds Of Sparrows." As on the latter-mentioned track, religious questioning and themes are brought up a lot on the album, and it fits the tone of the music very well. The album closes out with another simple little track called, "Junebug." Once again, it's just voice, acoustic guitar, and some chimes, but it's amazing. If you're into Elephant 6-type bands or simply like great little, well-written songs, Good Morning Spider is well worth it.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/396922182/Sparkle-Sparkle-mn1ng.rar

Distorted Ghost EP [2000]

44.6MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "Happy Man (Memphis Version)" ? 3:41
2. "Waiting For Nothing" ? 2:31
3. "Happy Place" ? 2:17
4. "My Yoke Is Heavy" ? 3:32
5. "Gasoline Horseys" ? 3:28
6. "Happy Pig" ? 4:01

Review:
More like a fan ep then one for the casual listener, this dubious short length nonetheless can still introduce those irresistable qualities prevelent in this songwriter's quirky depression. Featuring two editions of their catchy, but rockin as hell "happy man" only proceed if you have checked out other full lenghts of the fractured pop rock.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/399102474/Sparkle-Sparkle-d1st0rt3dgh05t.rar

Gold Day EP [2001]

44.7MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
Gold Day 4:16
Heloise 1:08
Devil's New 3:33
Maxine 10:34

Review:
Like the last light of a summers evening this goes down with a quiet contentment. A tune laid back enough to be soothing but simultaneously purposeful enough to hold your attention. The vocals coo over the strings and organ backing, the closest reference point being somewhat unbelievably "Strawberry Fields" era Beatles.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/399107370/Sparkle-Sparkle-g0l5D4y.rar

It's a Wonderful Life [2001]

147MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "It's a Wonderful Life" ? 2:59
2. "Gold Day" ? 4:14
3. "Piano Fire" ? 2:43
4. "Sea of Teeth" ? 4:29
5. "Apple Bed" ? 4:54
6. "King of Nails" ? 4:18
7. "Eyepennies" ? 5:27
8. "Dog Door" (Brennan/Linkous/Waits) ? 2:46
9. "More Yellow Birds" ? 4:53
10. "Little Fat Baby" (Chesnutt/Linkous) ? 3:40
11. "Devil's New" ? 3:32
* Excluded from European release.
12. "Comfort Me" ? 5:01
13. "Babies on the Sun" ? 4:37
14. "Morning Hollow" [hidden track] ? 7:26

Review:
Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art. Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to find yourself off on some tangent you never saw coming. It takes a certain amount of discretion, and often, a certain amount of objective distance, to decide which roads to continue down and which ones to abandon. In music, this is, of course, where producers come in. Their job is essentially to stop the artist from getting carried away with a questionable idea and to moderate decisions about direction and material.

Past Sparklehorse efforts have been plagued by a certain lack of focus. This doesn't mean they weren't good records-- in fact, 1998's Good Morning Spider was something of a creative triumph, even in spite of its general disorganization. That said, though, hiring an outside producer (not to mention fully ridding himself of all drug habits) seems to have done Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous a great deal of good. Superproducer Dave Fridmann has developed a certain Midas Touch over the years, imbuing nearly every album he works on with a distinctive sonic character, and It's a Wonderful Life has his fingerprints all over it.

The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two. The half-songs and quickly squelched ideas of Linkous' past releases are absent in favor of fully fleshed pieces stuffed full of mellotrons, optigans, orchestrons, and sundry humming keyboards. Only once is its flow is only badly disrupted. (We'll get to that in a second.)

The majority of It's a Wonderful Life brims with electro American gothic ballads and fuzzy purees of lo-fi and hi-fi aesthetics. There aren't really any out-and-out rave-ups like "Pig" or "Happy Man," but a few of the mid-tempo numbers display enough bite for commercial radio play. (I'm asking too much, aren't I?) "Gold Day" snags the ear with a concise melodic hook and some snazzy mellotron flutes. And Linkous' defiantly surrealist approach to lyrics is in full effect here, with all manner of references to smiling babies, organ music, birds, and celestial bodies.

In fact, some of the lyrics are so surreal that it's hard to imagine they're even metaphors for anything. When Linkous implores, "Can you feel the rings of Saturn on your finger?" in the Vic Chesnutt-cast-adrift-in-a-post-modern-sound-collage number "Sea of Teeth," it's hard to believe that there's much hidden meaning behind it. Animal imagery also abounds; bees, poison frogs, roosters, dogs, doves, and horses all pop up on the first track. How exactly the line, "I'm full of bees that died at sea," proceeds logically to the title refrain of, "It's a wonderful life," is questionable at best, but the claustrophobic mix of optigan, static, chamberlin, and Linkous' plaintive delivery redeems the lyrical content with beautiful production and shimmering instrumentation.

The soulful PJ Harvey duet "Piano Fire" picks up the energy a bit, proffering lyrical imagery of dusty organs and pianos washing up on beaches, amid a heavily distorted guitar racket and subtly employed electronics. In different places, It's a Wonderful Life conjures recent Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Grandaddy, all bands who operate in roughly the same headspace as Linkous. The quietly bleeping "Apple Bed," in particular, recalls some of The Sophtware Slump's more elegiac moments.

Unfortunately, there's that one aforementioned sore thumb that interrupts the otherwise smooth flow of the album, so allow me to preface my next statement with the following diatribe: I love Tom Waits. His music is rarely short of brilliant on some level, and I've long admired his position as one of the most fearless, innovative, and downright unique songwriters on the planet. The man's craft is his genius personified, and I can't get enough of it.

So why does his contribution to It's a Wonderful Life suck so much? "Dog Door" is a miserable distraction. Imagine you're floating down a peaceful river on a raft. It's just you, the trees, the birds, and the fish. You don't have a care in the world. Then, suddenly, the violent hillbillies from Deliverance swoop down out of nowhere, pelting you with rocks and shouting an unmemorable phrase over and over again in an annoying, processed falsetto. That is "Dog Door." Allow me now to sulk like a denied child.

The flow of the album actually picks back up rather easily after "Dog Door" finally, mercifully ends, returning to the eerily placid fare that characterizes the rest of the proceedings with "More Yellow Birds." Soon after, "Babies on the Sun" closes things on a tired, but musically inventive note, with burbling electronics and looped string samples supporting typically cryptic lyrics.

It's a Wonderful Life is a strong offering for Sparklehorse, largely shaking off the excesses of past efforts (maddening Tom Waits collaboration aside) in favor of cohesion and structure. The focus unfortunately keeps Linkous from accessing any truly awe-inspiring standout moments like the ones on past records, but the overall result is a lot more rewarding in the long term.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/396918193/Sparkle-Sparkle-filledwithw0nder.rar

Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain [2006]

121MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "Don't Take My Sunshine Away" ? 3:05
2. "Getting It Wrong" ? 2:16
3. "Shade and Honey" ? 4:08
4. "See the Light" ? 3:42
5. "Return to Me" ? 3:18
6. "Some Sweet Day" ? 4:20
7. "Ghost in the Sky" ? 3:28
8. "Mountains" ? 3:42
9. "Morning Hollow" ? 7:23
10. "It's Not So Hard" ? 2:52
11. "Knives of Summertime" ? 4:19
12. "Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain" ? 10:35

Review:
In some ways it's a small miracle that Sparklehorse's fourth album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, is seeing the light of day. Five years in the making, it was hindered by Mark Linkous' professional and personal frustrations, depression, and his well-documented fight with drug addiction. He shied away from recording and playing live, moved to North Carolina, and worked piecemeal on this record. He revived one song from the sessions of his previous album, recorded a few with Danger Mouse, remixed an old B-side, and laid down some tracks alone in his home, playing all the instruments himself. The resulting collection should sound fragmented and disparate, its songs disconnected from one another. Instead, Dreamt for Light Years is a surprisingly unified whole as well as a powerful statement about death and life.

All the elements that have garnered Linkous a small, but loyal, cult audience are present on Dreamt for Light Years, and he sequences the album to make the most of the contrast. Sad, delicate songs like "Return to Me" and "Morning Hollow" abut brittle, abrasive rockers like "It's Not So Hard" and "Ghosts in the Sky" or damaged ballads like "Mountains". The opener and second track comprise a solid one-two punch: "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" is full of Beach Boys harmonies and gently skewed folk-rock, but "Getting It Wrong" counters that deceptive sunniness with dungeon-dark lyrics and vocals that sound like they're decaying in the air between the speakers and your ears. "They're playing our song," Linkous sings. "They're getting it wrong". That simple, inspired lyric sums up the Sparklehorse aesthetic: disassembling a song to make it stronger, getting it wrong to get it right. Static and distortion rise up regularlyas noisy punctuation to tender songs, creating a sense of fragility as if the music could crumble at any second.

Delivering his despairing lyrics, Linkous alternates between his insectoid falsetto, blemished tenor, and melting moan, each of which sounds fragile and human on its own but all the more affecting for stumbling into each other. Coming after the garbled vocals of "Getting It Wrong", his unfiltered voice-- deep and mic'ed almost uncomfortably close-- sounds joltingly natural and almost too intimate, a telling transition on an album that alternately lulls and unsettles.

For someone who has a reputation as a hermit, Linkous collaborates frequently. Dreamt for Light Years features an impressive lineup of guests, but anyone searching for those contributions could be disappointed-- only Sol Seppy's backing vocals on "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" and "Morning Hollow" stand out, her crystalline voice beautifully countering Linkous' grainy drawls. Tom Waits' piano and Joan Wasser's violin on "Morning Hollow" and Steve Drozd's drums on "It's Not So Hard" have been wholly absorbed into the Sparklehorse sound. Even Danger Mouse, reportedly a huge Sparklehorse fan who is planning a proper collaboration with Linkous, keeps the beats in check. "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" fades out on his high-hat beat, and his sturdy drum sample stitches "Getting It Wrong" together, countering its decay with clockwork steadiness. With its vocals buried in a film of white noise and its melody interrupted by regular guitar squalls, "Mountains" proves the highlight of both the album and Danger Mouse's contributions. Against synth burbles, ambient drone, and a fixed beat, Linkous quotes lines from "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", conveying overwhelming gravity and wonder, its innocence sprouting not from naivet? but from real experience with true misery.

Dreamt for Light Years proves less targeted than 2001's It's a Wonderful Life, but this is a check in the plus column: Linkous sounds best when he's warring with structure and sound, when his songs sound unsettled. It's less fascinatingly self-destructive than 1998's Good Morning Spider, but that album's devastating self-sabotage seems unrepeatable. Instead, this sweetly weird Dreamt for Light Years finds the common ground between the polished songcraft of the latter and sculpted static sounds of the former, resulting in an album that has the feel of a long journey undertaken. That metaphor usually signals a difficult, tedious work, but in this case it means these songs in this sequence comprise a solid, absorbing album with a shifting musical landscape and as many contradictions as any 40-minute passage in anyone's life. At the end of this journey is the title track, a ten-minute instrumental with barely a hint of meandering melody and dissolving structure. It could be death. Or rebirth. Or a dream inside the belly of a mountain. It's sure something.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/396914844/Sparkle-Sparkle-dr34mt.rar

Sparklehorse and Fennesz ? In the Fishtank Vol. 15 [2009]

91.4MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1- music box of snakes
2- goodnight sweetheart
3- shai- hulud
4- if my heart
5- mark?s guitar piece
6- NC bongo buddy
7- christian?s guitar piece

Review:At first glance this seems like a very unlikely collaboration for Christian Fennesz since singer-songwriter Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse is primarily known as a purveyor of "spooky, lo-fi roots-pop", as allmusic puts it. But Linkous has been unafraid to experiment with sound so it shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. In any event, there's no question that it's a collaboration that works and it puts an unusually approachable face on Fennesz's artistry.

The combination of Linkous' vulnerable vocals on a couple of tracks and down-to-earth acoustic guitar and Fennesz's abstractions and laptop manipulation produces some beautiful and touching moments. There are also a couple of outbursts on the other end of the spectrum - noisy and distorted - but it's the atmospheric glow of the record that wins out.

Cod:

http://rapidshare.com/files/399103797/Sparkle-Sparkle-f1sht4nk.rar

Dark Night of the Soul [2010]

107MB/320kbps/mp3

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Tracklisting:
1. "Revenge" (featuring The Flaming Lips) ? 4:52
2. "Just War" (featuring Gruff Rhys) ? 3:44
3. "Jaykub" (featuring Jason Lytle) ? 3:52
4. "Little Girl" (featuring Julian Casablancas) ? 4:33
5. "Angel's Harp" (featuring Black Francis) ? 2:57
6. "Pain" (featuring Iggy Pop) ? 2:49
7. "Star Eyes (I Can't Catch It)" (featuring David Lynch) ? 3:10
8. "Everytime I'm with You" (featuring Jason Lytle) ? 3:09
9. "Insane Lullaby" (featuring James Mercer) ? 3:12
10. "Daddy's Gone" (featuring Nina Persson) ? 3:09
11. "The Man Who Played God" (featuring Suzanne Vega) ? 3:09
12. "Grim Augury" (featuring Vic Chesnutt) ? 2:32
13. "Dark Night of the Soul" (featuring David Lynch) ? 4:38

Review:

The Dark Night of the Soul, a term coined by the 17th century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, describes a point in a pious Christian's life when they are unable to reconcile their relationship to God, and take painful steps to purify themselves. Mark Linkous-- better known as Sparklehorse-- would seem to understand something about trials and endurance. If any current performer has endured traumatic, life-altering experiences-- an early-1990s overdose that damaged his legs and almost killed him, several years in and out of states of severe depression and addiction-- while retaining an optimistic disposition, it's him.

In 2005, Linkous' friends tried to pry him out of a depressed state by playing him new music. One record that struck him was Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which led to a mutually appreciative relationship between the two artists. Danger Mouse worked on a few songs on Sparklehorse's 2006 return-to-form Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, cutting Linkous' delicate, hermetic songs with a new type of sharpness and color. In interviews for that record, Linkous and Danger Mouse kept dropping hints at a future collaboration: maybe it would be called Dangerhorse, maybe Sparklemouse. It would be something.

It ended up as Dark Night of the Soul, involving more than a dozen noteworthy musical collaborators as well as David Lynch, who signed on to create a 100-page book of original photography inspired by Linkous and Danger Mouse's music. As news leaked the buzz grew louder, and people were excited for a reason: Dark Night combined the best elements of a classic rock event with a very modern strategy. Links between the film, music, and art worlds were established, a ton of stars gathered together under the creative guidance of a couple of relative recluses, a regular old CD was marketed like a Hollywood blockbuster and packaged with a photo album for 50 bucks.

Unfortunately, it's even become a "lost album," as well-- the victim of a record label acting like a lawsuit-happy killjoy. In the last few weeks, it came to light that the record was being shelved due to some sort of mysterious copyright claim from EMI (who weren't too happy with Danger Mouse's first foray into recorded music, either). Danger Mouse, who has emerged as the public face of the project, issued a statement that the book would thus be issued with a blank CD, ostensibly for burning leaked copies of the album.

This is one particular circumstance where a leak-- even at 160kbps-- is a net positive. This project, incomplete as it may be, is certainly worth "possessing," in whatever form that takes. Linkous and Danger Mouse both have proven conclusively in the past that they know how to choose collaborators, and Dark Night is a well-sequenced and unique album that ingeniously balances its contributors' strengths with the overall theme of the work-- self-examination, often under stark circumstances, in the interest of understanding one's own existence.

It's not signaled outright, but Dark Night comprises four sections, and plays like a revue. Linkous has always feared putting himself out there too much, and seeming too "pop." It makes sense that he'd open this collection with a triptych from Wayne Coyne, Gruff Rhys, and Jason Lytle, all of whom frequently sing in Linkous-like registers shot through with delicate, boyish wonder and play with psychedelia in similarly rewarding ways. On "Revenge", Coyne works in a wheelhouse he's not seen since The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, evangelizing, "Once we become/ The thing we dread/ There's no way to stop," in the form of a plangent ballad. For his part, Gruff Rhys works best at the level of empire, and the fuzzy psych-country of "Just War" could fit nicely on Phantom Power. As is his manner, Lytle's "Jaykub" traces an everyday schlub's dream of receiving official awards for simply being himself-- until the alarm clock wakes him up.

The middle two sections of the record are its weakest, but there are rewards all the same. Julian Casablancas' "Little Girl" opens what could be dubbed the "punk" section, his slick insouciance sounding strangely out of place eight years after Is This It, at a time when punk vocal styles have largely trended toward the amateurish and overdriven. Regardless, he's able to effectively register his everyday/macho character, nonchalantly singing in front needly guitars (and a rock solo!). It's followed by Frank Black's "Angel's Harp", one of the more forced-feeling cuts, and then Iggy Pop's "Pain", on which he ramps up his best, darkest croon, looking back at his life with a mix of regret and pride. The guitars on Pop's piece are strikingly reminiscent of those on the Magazine song "Shot By Both Sides", which is noteworthy because Real Life was re-released in 2007 by, you guessed it, EMI. The guitars are too crucial to the piece to lose, and Iggy's too big of a name to drop from this collection. Perhaps "Pain" is the reason for the forced abandonment of this whole thing?

Either way, Dark Night shifts again after "Pain" to its second psychedelic section, featuring David Lynch himself, another Lytle number, "Everytime I'm With You", on which he is completely resigned to just hanging out and getting resoundingly up, and James Mercer. Lynch's "Star Eyes (I Can Catch It)" is a piece of muddy string-laden psychedelia, but Mercer's effort, the wonderfully titled "Insane Lullaby", is one of the finest moments on the album. Turns out that Mercer is as much a doppelganger for Linkous as Lytle, Coyne, and Rhys, and his cadence and vocal inflections are situated amidst a gently stunning cacophony of glitches, bells, and strings. He sounds like he's lost, but he also sounds like he's loving it.

Dark Night's best sequence is its last one, when Linkous reunites himself with Nina Persson, formerly of the Cardigans, and singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt (both guested on the 2001 Sparklehorse LP Its Wonderful Life). Persson and Linkous split vocal duties on the country-tinged number "Daddy's Gone", the lovely, sentimental sort of "pop" that Linkous has always seemed so afraid of, yet is also exceedingly, seemingly effortlessly, capable of making. Chesnutt finishes the record with "Grim Augury", which, along with the Lynch-feauring title track, is a fitting one-two punch of rural eccentricity that allows Linkous to reengage with the woodshed hermit side of his musical persona.

Dark Night of the Soul has been pitched as a marquee collaboration without precedent, which makes the mundane EMI copyright baloney that scrapped the project all the more depressing. But while Danger Mouse, Lynch, and the dozen or so artists involved with the project contributed their talents, the feeling I get from Dark Night is all Linkous. In genre terms-- punk rock, country, schizophrenic folk, psychedelia, space-rock-- the album neatly indexes his own discography as much as the overriding thematics do. It's fitting, then, that an artist who is on one hand so admittedly fearful of performance, and on the other has such a knack for collaboration, would make an album such as this, on which a group of musical actors present his work while he stands off to the side in the shadows.

Cod:

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