Outfitted with a white cowboy hat and standing before two microphones, Sparklehorse boss Mark Linkous was contrast personified. Through the first mic, his voice sounded strong and sweet, and on this night it filled New York's Bowery Ballroom like Geoff Lynne's once filled arenas brimming with ELO fans. Through the second, his pretty tones were strangled by static, as though he were singing through a garbled pay phone or from an old record crackling on a creaky turntable.

To begin a hypnotic ballad called "Painbirds," Linkous leaned over and whispered, "Goddamn, it's so very hot," into the clean mic. But he moved over to the dirty mic when he got to the catchy chorus, making it harder to hear his words, and just plain weird to boot. This kind of wanton destruction of a song's potential for commercial airplay must drive the folks at Capitol Records nuts, but it endears Linkous to his grateful fans. As he somewhat cryptically told those gathered tonight, "Thank you for paying attention. You're the best American audience we've ever had. Unless you're all freaks -- that's why we get along so well."

Linkous is a man given to contradiction. For starters, Sparklehorse is a band that's not really a band at all; Linkous hires different musicians to support him on each tour or record. His nature-drenched songs are filled with junebugs, spiders and withered roots, but they're performed with drum machines, sequencers and violins. And while some rock bands sandwich a short "unplugged" set of songs amid their noisier fare, Sparklehorse followed each and every ferocious guitar rave-up with a moody backwoods ballad, every melancholy waltz with a muscular backbeat. Dave Dreiwitz switched off between acoustic and electric bass on practically every song, and Jonathan Segal played gorgeous violin lines, chiming glockenspiel arpeggios and foaming guitar leads -- sometimes all during one song.

If Linkous seems overly willing to take risks in his heuristic blend of country and rock & roll, the man has his reasons. Three years ago, while on tour with Radiohead, Linkous overdosed on Valium, went into cardiac arrest and spent the next six months in a wheelchair. As if to chronicle the long dark nights and uncertain days of recovery, his new record, Good Morning Spider, explores twisty country lanes and high-energy superhighways. During this show, Sparklehorse traveled both. For "Sunshine," a gentle ballad beset with simple electric piano chords, Linkous sang, "I lay down on the grass/and let the insects do their thing," as keyboards blipped and burbled along. On a revved-up guitar anthem called "Happy Man," Segal tore snarls and spurs from his fuzzed-out guitar as the band approached a peak of pure rock bliss.

The Bowery crowd stomped enthusiastically for this, but it was the mysterious half-light ballads that touched deepest. The moment that best captured Linkous' resigned outlook was when he sang, "It's a sad and beautiful world." It's the same line that Italian film-clown extraordinaire Roberto Benini delivers in the comedy Down By Law, but it makes just as much sense in a broken-hearted Sparklehorse song.

RODD McLEOD
(April 19, 1999)