It's a Wonderful Life

Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1
EAN: 4988006793637
ASIN: B00005J4XQ

Release Date: 2001-08-06

It's a Wonderful Life

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Tracks:

Its A Wonderful Life
Gold Day
Piano Fire
Sea Of Teeth
Apple Bed
King Of Nails
Eyepennies
Dog Door
More Yellow Birds
Little Fat Baby
Comfort Me
Babies On The Sun
Morning Hollow (Bonus Track)
Ghost In The Sky (Bonus Track)

Album Description

Third album for the critically acclaimed U.S. indie act, and follow-up to the 1999 album, 'Good Morning Spider'.Featuring guest appearances from PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Nina Persson & Dave Fridmann. Mostly self produced with additional production from John Parrish. This Japanese pressing features two bonus tracks, 'Morning Hollow' & 'Ghost In The Sky'. 14 tracks in all featuring the first single, 'Gold Day'. 2001.

Customer Reviews:

Wonderful "Life".......2005-01-15

How does one follow up a modern indie classic, such as Sparklehorse's "Good Morning Spider"? In the case of "It's a Wonderful Life," they just keep on going. This album is more mellow and polished, but Mark Linkous's songs still ring with melancholy indiepop and fuzzy rock.

The title track sets the tone for the rest of the album: A soft guitar melody, with faint bubbles and chirps lurking behind it. The nonsensical lyrics can't hide the melancholy in Linkous's voice, which lets up a little in the soft, sweet flute ballad "Gold Day." "In silver piles of smiles/may all your days be gold/my child," Linkous sings fondly.

At first listen the songs sound very much alike. But repeated listens reveal little nuances -- the intimate cadences of Linkous's voice, fuzzy rock riffs, violins, a pretty piano melody. "More Yellow Birds" is particularly pretty, with its hesitant singing and swelling string arrangements. Linkous sounds almost painful in this song.

Fortunately Sparklehorse has not lost its experimental edge here, even though the experiments sometimes fail. For example, "Dog Door" is a mess of hoarse vocals and a thumpy rock sound that degenerates into fizzing and wild feedback. The fifteen-minute finale, "Babies on the Sun," is more palatable: a slightly eerie ambient buildup to a solemn guitar ballad.

Musically, Sparklehorse has almost no flaws -- the musicianship of this album is almost perfect, and the strange lyrics give it the quality of a dream. It's not music that sounds in any way normal. Instead it feels like a sonic painting of Mark Linkous's psyche, with all the love, pain, sorrow and beauty that can be expressed in words.

None of the songs make conventional sense. No my-girlfriend-left-me-and-life-sucks songs. Instead Linkous strings together colorful phrases about circus people, ghosts, dogs that ate birthday cakes, and skinny wolves. And he has the occasional moment of sheer brilliance: "Can you feel the wind of venus on your skin?/San you taste the crush of a sunset's dying blush?"

String arrangements in rock music are getting more and more common, but they are rarely put to such brilliant use as in "It's a Wonderful Life," right alongside odd chimes, mellow acoustic guitar and some very slow piano. It seems tailor-made for Linkous's oddball vocals, which might sound weird if he didn't always seem so sad and pensive.

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