The history of rock and roll boasts some tremendously miraculous happenings, some blindingly bright and beautiful, others sickeningly dark. The story of Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous takes its place firmly on the latter scale.
The oft-told, almost mythical tale - which Linkous no doubt wishes to forget - also nails a firm perspective on the bewitching, somewhat deathly twists and turns of the Sparklehorse 'output', as we reach album number three.
A few years back, Linkous - then a manic depressive drug addict - overdosed in a London hotel, collapsed, trapping his legs under his body for hours. After stepping into the 'afterlife', he was pulled back from the brink, resuscitated and recovered, spending a year in a wheelchair. Even now, he has metal plates in his legs and, it would seem, a terminally ruptured soul.
Although now apparently drug-free, there are a host of other familiar 'Horse traits on the follow-up to 1998's magnificent 'Good Morning Spider'.
Essentially, 'It's A Wonderful Life', is an equally brilliant and perhaps more cohesive album, mixing an arcane guitar, string and keyboard based atmospheric tilt, with more fast-action, barrelling moments. Linkous has also retained an almost insane obsession with animals and babies, with plentiful references littering the crackling, alt. country landscape.
The album opens with the childlike, revolving plod of the title track, in which Linkous reveals: "I'm the dog that ate your birthday cake". From here on in the record is dominated by a set of mid-paced, moribund lo-fi dispatches, again produced by the gold-fingered touch of Dave Fridmann, while, for the first time, a host of guests feature.
Linkous is joined by Polly Harvey on the graceful cremation of 'Eyepennies' and the Cardigan's Nina Persson, who adds her suitably luxurious shrill to 'Apple Bed' and 'Gold Day'. Perhaps best though is the bleeding and desperate Linkous lunacy of 'Dog Door', featuring an equally perturbed Tom Waits.
Of course, Linkous is still well capable of creating an atmosphere of spell-binding, fractured beauty without star assistance, as evidenced by the lilting charm of 'Little Fat Baby' and the mesmeric closer 'Babies In The Sun'.
Fortunately, the album is given occasional keening tempo, to magnificent effect on the skewed barrage of 'Piano Fire' - Harvey's vocals piercing the electronic and guitar fuzz - while the equally ferocious 'King Of Nails' charges onwards to a backdrop of "blood rushing up the stairs".
Whether Linkous actually believes it is a wonderful life is a different conversation. Maybe he's just glad to be alive. Either way, and for the first time in recent Western civilisation, a prodigious and police-approved injection of the 'Horse into your system is heartily recommended.
