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.

 

Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles by Mark Archer, Milano, Ariosto Spazio Cinema, 05/11/2023

Filming music is easier than photographing it. Herman Leonard, one of the greatest music photographers, was accustomed to capture jazzmen in smokey clubs and venues, where smoke was taken as a direct emanation of the sound of the instruments. Filming music is easier, as we were pointing out, since you have both movement and the sonorous aspect of it all.

Having a great film of a performance by a musician is always so fine. You can see how musicians approach physically their instruments, how they produce their sounds, and finally many things that previously, while you were listening to your albums, were up to your imagination, now are real in front of you, as something your eyes can almost bite.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see Don’t Go Gentle – A Film About Idles thanks to a small review in a small cinema in Milano city not far from the train station and the center of the city itself. It was the fourth and final act of a review featuring movies about Kurt Cobain, Joy Division and a documentary about the NY city scene. The movies were introduced by a nice panel discussion held by music journalists, musicians and other people coming directly from the music business. 

Obviously the movie about the Idles was the most interesting since Idles are the most contemporary musical act between the ones featured in the review. They tell so much about what can happen to musicians nowadays, about how they relate to music, to business, to fans and to themselves, and about the present time.

We are, so, introduced in Bristol, a city open to otherness through immigration and love for music like reggae and dub since the 1970s. It’s not a chance that musicians like Tricky, Massive Attack and Portishead, but also, way before them, The Pop Group, come from this city. Joe Talbot and his pals started playing for fun and in the end they become professionals.

This road is filled with mournings, like Talbot mother’s and son’s deaths, great encounters, like the community revolving around the band, and obviously great music. The movie is both enojoyable and strange in a way. It is strange to hear a band in 2020 proclaiming that they don’t like Pink Floyd as a symbol of progressive rock in general, as an example.

This is obviously part of an old script, and if it is thought as useful in introducing Idles’ music, it doesn’t help in understanding what this music is made of. Possibly Archer’s and the band’s idea was to let the music talk about itself, focusing all the interest into the human factor. A winner’s game, since if we all are aware and well known about post-punk, it would have been useless mimicking Simon Reynolds. A musician is not a critic.

The movie cover Idles since their beginning until their first release for Partisan Records with the album Joy as an Act of Resistance. During this first years they gave life to music that was in a way a soundtrack for Brexit, problems with immigration, recession and more intimate topics like the aforementioned mournings, love, friendship and mental health just to name a few.

Hated by conservatives all around the world, even by rock fans who in front of them discover to be conservatives – it’s full and they’re cultivated also by some magazines as such – because of their ‘sloganistic’, or better said anthemic approach to politics, critisiced as a bunch of white privileged men who try to criticize white privilege itself, Idles are nonetheless one of the most intriguing band nowadays.

Because of their approach to music, precise as a razor blade, because of their approach to life, with this attitude made of bringing to light every possible weak point and made a force out of it, because of their relationship with fans, that are allowed to feel fragile and open to each other during meetings and online, they in a way say nothing new in the realm of the history of music, but say something relevant as far as human being in the present times.

When Joe Talbot in an interview reported in the movie says ‘I want to become a better man through music, and so in the end I want to create better music from it’, these are the exact same words pronounced decades before by John Coltrane. And if the music is different stylistically, the importance of this thought is nonetheless that of a person who want to create a virtous relationship between his art and his life.

The fact that this approach to both reality and sound is explicit and appreciated is something not completely new but interesting in a world, that of the art, where we are accustomed to hear things like “political correctness is impossible to manage because we should erase the memory of most of the artists in the world because of their behavior towards other human beings” – think about Picasso and women, or Gaugin and native Tahitians as good examples.

Far from wanting to create a Police of the morals through music, Idles and Coltrane, or Idles and other musicians, like many in the punk and post-punk scenes all around the world, are part of a history of music and of musicians wanting to create a community to make life more bearable for its participants. We sould not erase artists, but also we should not erase the importance of these attemps.