Sparklehorse "Mountains"
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
In the mid-to-late Nineties, a singular style of brittle, spacy psychedelic rock started forming from the output, more or less, of four bands. The most important records to emerge out of this quartet—Mercury Rev’s See You On the Other Side and Deserter’s Songs, Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic and The Soft Bulletin, Sparklehorse’s Good Morning, Spider and It’s A Wonderful Life, and Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump—combined to form a strain of American psychedelic music that can stand with any of the more celebrated varieties created 30+ years ago. Former Mercury bassist and producer/auteur Dave Fridmann can take credit for large portions of the sonics on every one of these records save Spider and Sophtware, but the bands were united by more than just atmosphere. Lyrical themes melded the ethereal and incomprehensible with the banal and tangible; birth and childhood, life and death were allowed to remain distant, sublime and scary. All of which wouldn’t have worked without being delivered with the tenderly cracked, upper-register deliveries of the four singers—easily the most recognizable uniting quality of the four bands. And just remember, all of this wonderful music happened when I was finishing college and pretty much getting high all the time, so that made all of it so much more personally meaningful.
Well, it’s been a few years since those days, and now it’s 2006 and I’m back in grad school and not really getting high at all. The Flaming Lips have just released their worst album since their early scuzz days, Mercury Rev has receded into a lavender cloud of woozy fairy-tale bombast, and Grandaddy broke up after accidentally putting out the same album twice. And in the upset of the century, Mark Linkous, as Sparklehorse, is the only one still creating meaningful music of the original four. Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of the Mountain is once again helmed by Fridmann in places, (and the omnipresent Danger Mouse in others—Linkous played bass on parts of Danger Doom) and the record picks up exactly where Life, one of the best releases yet this century, left off. Linkous has always taken an Ed Kienholz-ish approach to musical atmosphere: antique-sounding songs in all shades of brown, littered with rusty detritus that only appears to be junk. And his best songs, like “Mountains” (mp3)
are indelibly his— lullaby melodies, multi-tracked vocals that simultaneously whisper and croon, guitars pushed to the point of ripping. There’s no need for him to change his formula, and he hasn’t. This song proves it—it’s achingly affected, decidedly rural and full of the sort of boyish hope that most of us wish we could still access.
Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of the Mountain will be released on Astralwerks September 26. Pre-order it from Amazon here. Sparklehorse’s website and Myspace.
AND IF YOU’RE IN BLOOMINGTON OR INDY OR OTHERWHERE NEARBY: Come meet up with me at Bear’s Place on Third St. Wednesday night at 10pm. Turns out Simon Joyner, the nomadic, prolific home-recorder and Jagjaguwar signee, just dropped a show on us with no advance notice. Opening up is The Future and the great, great spazzy skronk of St. Louis’ Jumbling Towers, to whom you must listen now.
AND WHAT’S MORE: Not like this is surprising news or anything, but Sean at Said the Gramophone has written a great piece on Belle and Sebastian that I’ve read twice now. It’s a wonderful autobiographical testament to the occasional kismet that comes from mp3 shuffling and the memories that follow. Click the link in the first paragraph to his B&S live review because it’s great, too. Oh, fuck it—here it is.
i love all those albums. Deserter’s Songs and Sophtware Slump were very important to my indie-geek development.
I’m with Dave…those two records were huge for me as well (and being in college getting high didn’t exactly hurt my love for them either). I’ve long been an enormous fan of the last Sparklehorse record as well, and I’m quite excited to hear what Linkous has cooked up this time around.
“Mountains”, even on first listen, is fantastic. Thank you for this post…
bravo. i wish more music Bloggers would make the link between visual art and music. i loved your writing before, but now as you casually refer to Ed Keinholz in this piece…i am struck. There is room for this – which record this year has the scratchy buzz of Cy Twombly? And which has the precise beauty of Joseph Cornell? I could go on…..thank you.
wendy
LOVES
Sparklehorse!
“Mountains” takes me back to the 60’s when you could listen to and visualize the music, was it the music or just my state of mind at the time, whatever, I shall buy the Sparklehorse album.
holy shit. new sparklehorse! i need to get on this. gracias.
It’s been way too long without new Sparklehorse. You know, I always thought that one thing that tied those four bands together was a fondness/similarity to Neil Young. In space, though.
Just wanted to say thank you!
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