In some ways it's a small miracle that Sparklehorse's fourth album, Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, is seeing the light of day. Five years in the making, it was hindered by Mark Linkous' professional and personal frustrations, depression, and his well-documented fight with drug addiction. He shied away from recording and playing live, moved to North Carolina, and worked piecemeal on this record. He revived one song from the sessions of his previous album, recorded a few with Danger Mouse, remixed an old B-side, and laid down some tracks alone in his home, playing all the instruments himself. The resulting collection should sound fragmented and disparate, its songs disconnected from one another. Instead, Dreamt for Light Years is a surprisingly unified whole as well as a powerful statement about death and life.
All the elements that have garnered Linkous a small, but loyal, cult audience are present on Dreamt for Light Years, and he sequences the album to make the most of the contrast. Sad, delicate songs like "Return to Me" and "Morning Hollow" abut brittle, abrasive rockers like "It's Not So Hard" and "Ghosts in the Sky" or damaged ballads like "Mountains". The opener and second track comprise a solid one-two punch: "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" is full of Beach Boys harmonies and gently skewed folk-rock, but "Getting It Wrong" counters that deceptive sunniness with dungeon-dark lyrics and vocals that sound like they're decaying in the air between the speakers and your ears. "They're playing our song," Linkous sings. "They're getting it wrong". That simple, inspired lyric sums up the Sparklehorse aesthetic: disassembling a song to make it stronger, getting it wrong to get it right. Static and distortion rise up regularlyas noisy punctuation to tender songs, creating a sense of fragility as if the music could crumble at any second.
Delivering his despairing lyrics, Linkous alternates between his insectoid falsetto, blemished tenor, and melting moan, each of which sounds fragile and human on its own but all the more affecting for stumbling into each other. Coming after the garbled vocals of "Getting It Wrong", his unfiltered voice-- deep and mic'ed almost uncomfortably close-- sounds joltingly natural and almost too intimate, a telling transition on an album that alternately lulls and unsettles.
For someone who has a reputation as a hermit, Linkous collaborates frequently. Dreamt for Light Years features an impressive lineup of guests, but anyone searching for those contributions could be disappointed-- only Sol Seppy's backing vocals on "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" and "Morning Hollow" stand out, her crystalline voice beautifully countering Linkous' grainy drawls. Tom Waits' piano and Joan Wasser's violin on "Morning Hollow" and Steve Drozd's drums on "It's Not So Hard" have been wholly absorbed into the Sparklehorse sound. Even Danger Mouse, reportedly a huge Sparklehorse fan who is planning a proper collaboration with Linkous, keeps the beats in check. "Please Don't Take My Sunshine" fades out on his high-hat beat, and his sturdy drum sample stitches "Getting It Wrong" together, countering its decay with clockwork steadiness. With its vocals buried in a film of white noise and its melody interrupted by regular guitar squalls, "Mountains" proves the highlight of both the album and Danger Mouse's contributions. Against synth burbles, ambient drone, and a fixed beat, Linkous quotes lines from "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", conveying overwhelming gravity and wonder, its innocence sprouting not from naiveté but from real experience with true misery.
Dreamt for Light Years proves less targeted than 2001's It's a Wonderful Life, but this is a check in the plus column: Linkous sounds best when he's warring with structure and sound, when his songs sound unsettled. It's less fascinatingly self-destructive than 1998's Good Morning Spider, but that album's devastating self-sabotage seems unrepeatable. Instead, this sweetly weird Dreamt for Light Years finds the common ground between the polished songcraft of the latter and sculpted static sounds of the former, resulting in an album that has the feel of a long journey undertaken. That metaphor usually signals a difficult, tedious work, but in this case it means these songs in this sequence comprise a solid, absorbing album with a shifting musical landscape and as many contradictions as any 40-minute passage in anyone's life. At the end of this journey is the title track, a ten-minute instrumental with barely a hint of meandering melody and dissolving structure. It could be death. Or rebirth. Or a dream inside the belly of a mountain. It's sure something.
