SPARKLEHORSE

Good Morning Spider (Parlophone)

A couple of tracks in and you realise that, come Christmas, Good Morning Spider will almost certainly feature on many end of year “best of” lists. Not bad for what might be the first ever after-death album, given that head ‘Horse Mark Linkous was declared technically deceased while promoting their debut.

Sparklehorse’s sham-amateur approach is more ‘under your skin’ than ‘in your face’, its creepiness partly fuelled by the moody use of a Wurlitzer, a harmonium, a vibraphone and a children’s toy among other implements. Meanwhile, Linkous’ lyrical subject matter ranges over trees, insects, birds and animals, delivered in a soft, fragile vocal overflowing with pain and loneliness, plus a touch of menace now and then, and all steeped in the influences of Neil Young and some of the bruised melancholy of Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen and even Tindersticks.

But just when you think you’ve got it sussed Sparklehorse veer off on another musical tangent. ‘Pig’ opens the album with a lo-fi punkish sneer, but after the quiet vulnerability of the title track they counter with the country grunge-lite of ‘Sick Of Goodbyes’ which has the ghost of Uncle Neil hovering over it. The wistful ‘Box Of Stars’ owes a little to John Lennon with walrus era mellotronic snippets piping up here and there, while ‘Chaos Of The Galaxy/Happy Man’ is a raucous workout, starting as though played through an off-beam radio and then bursting into the light to pay its debt to the new wave of power pop.

Throughout the album there’s a sense of instruments popping in to have their say before reverently and politely tiptoeing off somewhere else. Linkous uses inventive, but never overdone, effects, like the deliberate tape flutter which shines through the sombreness of the contrarily-named ‘Sunshine’, and the vinyl surface noise on the disconsolate ‘Hey Joe’ (no, not that ‘Hey Joe’). The naughty words on the rampant ‘Pig’ will upset the concerned parents and those who suffer from vertigo should approach the closer ‘Junebug’ with caution.

There’s more than a hint of the depressed outdoors on much of Good Morning Spider , it being more a case of rural rather than urban hymns. Few of the songs use a standard rock band line-up, and you constantly fear there could be something dark and brooding waiting around every corner of its generous 17 tracks.

JACKIE HAYDEN