Album Review: Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain by Sparklehorse

If Mark Linkous's fourth album as the revered Sparklehorse is reminiscent of anything, it is of drinking one too many port and lemons in the afternoon and then drifting off, slightly dazed, in a sun-filled bedroom. Laid down at Linkous's new North Carolina studio, with production help from Danger Mouse, it is a lush, hazy romp around the outskirts of alt.country that shimmers with wonky pop genius. Some Sweet Day is a too-pretty love song, simple but effective, while Ghost in the Sky takes a melodic fuzz-filled grunge route but still ends up in the same joyous place.

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Mark Linkous has always taken a generous amount of time to deliver new Sparklehorse albums. There was a nearly four-year gap between Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot and Good Morning Spider (which was understandable, as recovering from a near-fatal accidental overdose tends to take some time), and while the two and a half years between that album and 2001's It's a Wonderful Life were closer to the norm for most artists, the time period was still sizable. The five-year span between It's a Wonderful Life and Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain wasn't just sizable, it was long enough to raise expectations of what the album could deliver to unreasonable levels.

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It's been five years since we last heard from everyone's favorite downer poet Mark Linkous and his Sparklehorse. This time around, he cast the net widely for collaborators, roping in everyone from producer Dangermouse to Steven Drozd, Dave Fridmann, and even a piano-plinking appearance from Tom Waits. Most of the songs were produced and recorded by Linkous at his own Static King studios, but it's a tribute to his singular focus that even those recorded elsewhere or produced by Dangermouse or Fridmann don't sound out of place.

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