Album Review: Bird Machine by Sparklehorse

I woke up and all my yesterdays were gone There's a certain mystique that has grown up around Sparklehorse these days, most attributable to the untimely demise of the group's mastermind, Mark Linkous. Prior to his tragic suicide in 2010, Linkous was responsible for four enthralling albums under the Sparklehorse moniker, as well as several noteworthy collaborations. His releases stubbornly refuse to get pinned down, relying on a scattershot approach which alternatively amazes and befuddles the listener, with his immediately recognizable lyrical sensibility - poetic, cryptic, often playful - belying an ever-lurking darkness.

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As posthumous, mop-up jobs go, Bird Machine is a fine effort. When Mark Linkous, the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist behind Sparklehorse, tragically took his own life on March 6, 2010, in Knoxville, Tennessee, he left behind the material that has turned into Bird Machine, carefully and sympathetically curated by his brother Matt Linkous. Although the album deviates somewhat from what Mark Linkous initially envisioned--a "straight-up pop record"--what we are left with is a strong, cohesive collection of material.

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Photo by Danny Clinch Bird Machine by Sparklehorse When Sparklehorse released Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot in 1995, it felt like an outlier. At the time, during the height of Britpop, there weren't many artists making slow-motion, country-influenced, lo-fi rock music like Mark Linkous. His aesthetic brought together a classic pop sensibility with a junkshop approach to instrumentation and timbre, where a song like "Chaos of the Galaxy / Happy Man" from second album Good Morning Spider literally sounded like tuning into a radio transmission.

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