Sparklehorse
Good Morning Spider (1999)

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 10/25/01

If I could encourage you to go to your local record store and shell out your hard-earned dough on one album right now, it's this one. Why?

Well first of all, the Radiohead comparison, since such a comparison is something often done in other music reviews for the band.

Sparklehorse = BETTER THAN RADIOHEAD.

And really, it does the members of Sparklehorse serious injustice to compare them to Radiohead. In fact, I'd wager that band leader Mark Linkous was fairly pissed-off when Amnesiac was released, as if he had been ripped off: the lo-fi fuzziness, the haunting collage of genres, all could find their roots in this album (dated 1999, ahem). But where Radiohead is commercial, Sparklehorse is nearly underground, where Radiohead is a product, Sparklehorse is a process. Every one of their albums, including Good Morning Spider, has been about musical exploration. Linkous has admitted his intentions in forming Sparklehorse where to create a more mainstream version of Tom Waits' Swordfishtrombone (and in fact, perhaps in deference to Waits, the band's fist album is similarly titled 'Vivadixiesubmarietransmissionplot')

The range of sound on Good Morning Spider is immense, but it somehow all fits together in a structure and thematic continuity of the concept albums of the 70's. The songs go from super lo-fi barely whispered ballads, to distortion soaked psychedelic country blues punk. The style sort of defies description. Maybe if you were to genetically splice Johnny Cash, Pink Floyd, and Tom Waits together, the screaming genius fetus writhing in your CD player would be Sparklehorse.

Among the notable tracks on the album are the acoustic magnificence of 'Painbirds' which incorporates some jazz horns. The song 'Saint Mary' and makes references in the lyrics to a scene from the harrowing novel by Denis Johnson, 'Jesus Son' :

"the only things
I really need
is water, a gun, and rabbits

let me rest
my fevered cheek
upon your warm sweet bellies"

(I suppose the reference may not make sense if you haven't read the novel (or seen the film), suffice to say, the scene it is describing is about a heroin addict trying to save a litter of baby rabbits by carrying them underneath his shirt against his stomach.)

Back to the music: Also worth careful listening is the track 'Chaos of the Galaxy' which fades between a strange, space-like organ piece, and a lo-fi punk number.

There is some amazing stuff tangled up in the spider's web here. Musically, it's both beautiful and intellectually interesting enough to keep anyone listening. It tops my list right now of favorite albums. But you don't have to just take my word for it. Check it out on Amazon. Most of the reviewers there gave it five stars.