Sparklehorses' Good Morning Spider

The music of Good Morning Spider is permeated by the trauma of Linkous, Sparklehorse's only permanent member. It's trauma at an atomic level--you can hear it in every single chord and every single word that emerges from Linkous' mouth. His feat is that he manages not to overburden the songs themselves with his deeply felt pain. The lyrics are dark-night-of-the-soul confessional with a certain shivery intimacy, but they are concerned with the physical rather than the mental, directed inside rather than at others. Linkous's main concerns are the state of his body and how to counteract the pain that is his daily reality. He never descends into whininess or cliché.

Caught in this web is the realization that physical pain can be joined by a sense of mental alienation--or how, for Linkous, "loneliness came kicking at my door." In the sixth track, "Box of Stars (Part One)," he sings of how "my bones wish to escape and run along." However, the crowning moment of Spider is the eighth track, "Chaos of the Universe/Happy Man." Just as the unrelieved anguish of the rest of the album starts to seem self-obsessive, this song saves it in the nick of time.

"Chaos/Happy" begins by sounding like it's being tuned in from a radio broadcast on a distant planet. It builds gradually; when it hits with full force midway through the tune, it's a real rush. In a deceptively simple song about "wanting to be a happy man," Linkous has captured the fleetingly sweet essence of his life hidden amidst the despair. The result is a deeply moving song on a remarkable album. (Capitol Records)

--Saul Austerlitz

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