Sparklehorse – Bird Machine (Anti-, 2023)

There WAS a time when creating music was as intense as giving shape to your own feelings, emotions, memories. To an image of yourself you wanted to give to the world for all to see. A time when music wasn’t only business, but also something purer. Not by chance a musician like Daniel Johnston was loved by many successful artists such as Kurt Cobain. I attended to a festival in Italy where Johnston was supposed to play, but in the end he refused for health reasons.

Those were the days. You were entitled to risk not to listen to one of your idols, but in the end you had anyway a music that was a pure ode to love. On the other hand you had musicians that, as Bono sang many years before, had to “kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. It wasn’t so easy to choose, but in the end the choice was there for you to grab it. The world was full of musicians similar to Johnston.

Another one was Vic Chestnutt, a singer/songwriter who released his first proper record – not the self produced tapes of Johnston – in 1990 and happy, so to speak, to give life to his musical vision until his death in 2009. Someone else has survived to his own demons, like Mark Oliver Everett, leader of the band Eels. Mr. E’s music is possibly the most similar to the music of Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse, today’s hero.

Just one year after Chestnutt death, in 2010, Linkous passed away shooting himself directly into the heart. He not only suffered for many years of a severe form of depression, not only was a heroin addicted, but he also saw his marriage gone into pieces, and sometimes things are too much. We thought so that the posthumous Dark Night of the Soul, a record produced by Danger Mouse and with a cover designed by David Lynch, was his last release,.

But time has many surprises for everyone, and for us it’s the time for a new album by Sparklehorse. Bird Machine is its title. The recordings found at his home were almost complete, and they needed only some slight retouch. Notes on Linkous diary were almost impeccable, near perfection, so one of three Mark’s brothers, Matt, had no difficulty in issuing with the label Anti- a record faithful to Linkous’ will.

Opened by It Will Never Stop, with his drum machine and a computer filtered guitar, the album starts with a surreal mood where restlesness and a certain humour are mixing together. Kind Ghosts is filled with kindly reversed sounds sparsed through the melody along with other strange sounds that remind of Radiohead’s most experimental music, even though the melody is well defined.

Evening Star Supercharger is for many one of the best songs of the album. A “perfect” pop song whose atmosphere makes you ask yourself why for someone is so difficult to heal themselves since they’re so good at exorcising your demons: it’s just a mystery. I had to listen to a couple of time the arpeggioed guitar and the melodies since they’re simply too chrystalline just to have been given birth by a tortured soul, but they’re here to remember us that reality is not black and white, simply.

O Child, for piano and a softly blown of voice, ends with a coda made of sounds that seem to come from another dimension and a field recording of a baby in it and it is possibly the most intriguing song on the album. Falling Down, with its Waitsian title and a perfect pop countenance it’s almost a hymn for all those moments when we see things get worse and unable to stop it, with a use of the metaphores that start with marvel and ends with concreteness.

I Fucked It Up is another song as we heard at the beginning, and the most similar to Eels’ most straight r’n’r pieces. Hello Lord, with its acoustic guitar and a filtered, doubled voice, it’s the peace before or after the storm, whereas Daddy’s Gone it’s pure Beatles in their essence of songwriting. Chaos of the Universe is a song built around an interesting wall of sound made of guitars and various keyboards.

Listening to the Higsongs, Robyn Hitchcock’s cover, with its jangling guitars, makes you realize that for the entire record Albini gave life to a production respectful of the will of the artist instead than producing a record with drums and bass deep and resonating as it happened to In Utero and Rid of Me, showing how flexible it is as a producer. Everybody’s Gone to Sleep is another beautiful ballad full of a ‘reversed sadness’, with everybody’s sleeping but the main character of the song, deprived of his love.

The Scull of Lucia is a melody for a music box, that type of found sound that Linkous can’t miss in its own music, Blue is basically a bassline nurtured with some sparse guitars over the main line and finally we arrive to Stay, a melancholic ask for proximity. In many songs the most used and intriguing device is to reverse the feelings expressed by both the lyrics and the music, before leaving come out the real imagines from Linkous fantasy.

A record created around contrasts and the feeling of a bitter sadness mostly transfigured as if music can really save yourself from harshness of life, nurtured with a faith in the art, that means ultimately in men, Bird Machine is Sparklehorse last gift to our world, with the hope to give someone in need a ray of light through the darkness.