It’s A Wonderful Life

Mark Linkous, it is safe to say, is better acquainted with death than most. Even if you leave aside the clinical depression, the attempt to take his own life and the (now-kicked) smack habit, his accident of a few years ago wherein he nearly lost his legs and was dead on a hospital table for two minutes, would, one assumes, bring anyone’s life-perspective a certain clarity. But even experiences this extreme don’t explain how Linkous (Sparklehorse’s sole rider) birthed this rich, elegiac, magical record: teeming with benevolent ghosts and strange, beautiful half-visions, it’s a humble, minutely-observed, vital paean to the natural and supernatural cycles of life, and death, and life again.

The gentle presence of co-producer Dave Fridmann, with his stately strings and dark steady piano like a pallbearer, bestows a bit of Mercury Rev’s mottled, quasi-Victorian grace; and contributions from PJ Harvey (quietly keening backing vocals and runaway-horse guitar), Nina Persson (perfect, tiny-voiced singing) and Tom Waits (er, deranged barking about garden implements) prove that celeb collaborations can result in great art, in the right hands (the ‘new improved’ Tricky take note).

…Wonderful Life is also, strangely, haunted throughout by the blithe spirits of babies: those not yet born, or long grown up; babies Linkous spies in the forest, and imagines on the face of the sun. He longs for a daughter, who will be ‘’magnificent as a horse.” “Won’t you come to comfort me?” he begs his future progeny, his worn-out croon cracked and hopeful, as gorgeous Mellotron strings swoop to gleeful, vertiginous pop heights around him.

So not a record about death at all, then. Either way, we couldn’t ask for a better spirit guide.