“Music had always been a shared language between Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous and his younger brother Matt, and as Mark began work on what he planned to be the fifth Sparklehorse album in 2009, the two of them would talk through his plans for the record. Matt can clearly recall their conversations; Mark’s excitement about the influences feeding into it and the way the songs were starting to take shape. It was these conversations that Matt and Melissa — Mark’s sister-in-law, who had also worked with Sparklehorse — returned to years later as they began to sift through boxes of tapes to catalogue and preserve Mark’s unreleased recordings and bring his posthumous album, entitled Bird Machine, to life. Mark was famously perfectionist about his work and the question of whether to complete the album weighed heavily on Matt. “It’s the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” says Matt. “It’s difficult making a choice about someone else’s art, even if you’ve known them all your life and worked with them, even if they were your brother and best friend. We had long conversations about not wanting to take this into a different direction. We wanted to bring out what was there.”
“A gorgeous collection of songs, etched with a familiar strangeness and beauty. It contains the contrasts and emotional depth that typified Linkous’s music: gentle and restrained in places, with blasts of exhilarating punkish energy elsewhere. And though subtly decorated with digital feints and touches – listen on headphones and you have the sense of lifting a rock in the woods to admire the teeming life beneath – the songs also carry a simplicity and directness that casts an immediate glow.”
orn and brought up in Virginia, Linkous formed Sparklehorse – essentially a solo project but with a changing cast of supporting musicians – in his early 30s, after spending much of his 20s in New York and LA seeking mainstream success with guitar pop quartet Dancing Hoods. When they split after two underperforming albums, he returned, disillusioned, to Virginia, and began slowly to develop Sparklehorse’s distinctive sound – a skewed combination of alt-rock, country and electronic pop, with melodies that emerge hauntingly from amid distortion and static, and lyrics that present the world in ways that feel revelatory and strange.
As Sparklehorse’s reputation grew, fellow musicians and artists were among the most devoted fans. He established an early musical kinship with Radiohead, supporting the band as they toured “OK Computer” and recording a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” with Thom Yorke. He later opened for the Flaming Lips and REM. And though he never had a big commercial breakthrough, not least because of a growing ambivalence about mainstream success, his “Dark Night of the Soul” album, recorded with producer Danger Mouse around the same time he was writing songs for his fifth album, shows how far his influence extended. Alongside vocals from musicians such as the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, Black Francis of Pixies and Iggy Pop, it also includes vocals and photographic artwork from David Lynch, a fellow observer of the unsettling beauty beneath the surface of American life.
‘Bird Machine’, the posthumous album by Sparklehorse aka Mark Linkous, uncovered from tapes and recordings archived by his brother Matt and sister-in-law Melissa. From the time that Mark began working on these songs to the record’s release today, 14 years have passed, a long time for a collection of tracks that were already well advanced at the time of Mark’s death. But there’s something too in the album’s long and complex gestation – the chaos of old tapes, the love and care that Mark’s family and his close musician friends have shown to every detail – that makes this so distinctively a Sparklehorse record.
“It means so much to me, this last batch of beautiful stuff that my brother was putting together,” says Matt. “When I sit down and put on a pair of headphones, I’ll put on the first track and run it all the way through. Everything from “It Will Never Stop” to “I Fucked it Up” to “Stay,” that’s Mark just letting it out.”
The Fat Angel Sings 