Sparklehorse: It's A Wonderful Life : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

A Virginia boy, Mark Linkous, moves to L.A., founds an overlooked alt-rock band and moves back to the mountains. Then he starts playing strange ballads so scruffy and imagistic that Tom Waits and PJ Harvey cameo on his new album. Linkous has a cracked, untricky voice, the perfect medium for the slow, elegiac songs of Sparklehorse's third album. He sings about the interior world in terms of the outside one - emotions and sense as beauty and entropy, display and decay. Waits' hoarse whisper motivates the creepy shuffle "Dog Door," and Harvey harmonizes on the haunting "Eyepennies." The music is as stately and deep as good loam, built around a few measures repeated stolidly with a kind of back-country resignation. Nothing here becomes anything else: Even the noise stays noise - "King of Nails" crashes lightly, full of cymbals and feedback; "Comfort Me" is skewed-key near-pop. Musing, eerie and oddly lovely, It's a Wonderful Life is almost minimalist - it captures fleeting moments in a few chords and peculiarly evocative phrases.

ARION BERGER
(RS 876 - August 30, 2001)