The quietly bleeping "Apple Bed," in particular, recalls some of The Sophtware Slump's more elegiac moments. In different places, It's a Wonderful Life conjures recent Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Grandaddy, all bands who operate in roughly the same headspace as Linkous. The soulful PJ Harvey duet "Piano Fire" picks up the energy a bit, proffering lyrical imagery of dusty organs and pianos washing up on beaches, amid a heavily distorted guitar racket and subtly employed electronics.
IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE SONG FULL
How exactly the line, "I'm full of bees that died at sea," proceeds logically to the title refrain of, "It's a wonderful life," is questionable at best, but the claustrophobic mix of optigan, static, chamberlin, and Linkous' plaintive delivery redeems the lyrical content with beautiful production and shimmering instrumentation. Animal imagery also abounds bees, poison frogs, roosters, dogs, doves, and horses all pop up on the first track.
When Linkous implores, "Can you feel the rings of Saturn on your finger?" in the Vic Chesnutt-cast-adrift-in-a-post-modern-sound-collage number "Sea of Teeth," it's hard to believe that there's much hidden meaning behind it. In fact, some of the lyrics are so surreal that it's hard to imagine they're even metaphors for anything. And Linkous' defiantly surrealist approach to lyrics is in full effect here, with all manner of references to smiling babies, organ music, birds, and celestial bodies. (I'm asking too much, aren't I?) "Gold Day" snags the ear with a concise melodic hook and some snazzy mellotron flutes. There aren't really any out-and-out rave-ups like "Pig" or "Happy Man," but a few of the mid-tempo numbers display enough bite for commercial radio play. The majority of It's a Wonderful Life brims with electro American gothic ballads and fuzzy purees of lo-fi and hi-fi aesthetics. The half-songs and quickly squelched ideas of Linkous' past releases are absent in favor of fully fleshed pieces stuffed full of mellotrons, optigans, orchestrons, and sundry humming keyboards. The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two.
Superproducer Dave Fridmann has developed a certain Midas Touch over the years, imbuing nearly every album he works on with a distinctive sonic character, and It's a Wonderful Life has his fingerprints all over it. That said, though, hiring an outside producer (not to mention fully ridding himself of all drug habits) seems to have done Sparklehorse frontman Mark Linkous a great deal of good. This doesn't mean they weren't good records- in fact, 1998's Good Morning Spider was something of a creative triumph, even in spite of its general disorganization. Past Sparklehorse efforts have been plagued by a certain lack of focus. Their job is essentially to stop the artist from getting carried away with a questionable idea and to moderate decisions about direction and material. In music, this is, of course, where producers come in. It takes a certain amount of discretion, and often, a certain amount of objective distance, to decide which roads to continue down and which ones to abandon.
Once you've begun creating something, it's easy to find yourself off on some tangent you never saw coming. Focus can be a difficult thing to maintain in art.
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