Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain

The first Sparklehorse album for the last five years

Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain is the first full length Sparklehorse album for the last five years. It’s a pretty long brake but still it is quite characteristic for Mark Linkous, the main and the only constant member of this band. His first record released in 1995 Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot has gained a good response from the audience but the newly born fans had to arm themselves with patience to hear the following release. It has taken about 4 years for Mark to recover from a near-fatal accidental overdose and make his second album Good Morning Spider, and while the two and a half years between that album and 2001's It’s a Wonderful Life were closer to the norm for most artists, the time period was still sizable. But now after a really sizable pause Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain takes a special responsibility to justify the expectations of listeners. During the years of musical career Mark Linkous has acquired a reputation of musical hermit and this couldn’t but find its reflection in his songs. Sparklehorse is a bit weird, laid back indie rock filled with melancholic notes. The new album keeps on expanding Mark’s musical vision setting songs to a subconscious level and making a listener apprehend them with feelings.

Dreamt For Light Days possesses a mystic and fragile beauty

The Sparklehorse sound is mostly made up of gloomy fragile vocals around medley of precise arrangement and experimentation. Dreamt For Light Years expands Linkous’s typical motifs, themes and atmosphere. The lyrics are overflowing with rich, nature-inspired imagery: mentions of graveyards, mountains, flowers and ghosts. The opener Don’t Take My Sunshine is a gentle folk rock with emotive arrangements. The song sounds more optimistic than most of previous Sparclehorse works. A glass crystal beauty of the album is accumulated in See the Light and Return to Me these are languid and explorative ballads that use an assortment of players and instruments to convey their somber mood. Ghost in the Sky and It's Not So Hard pace the album forward with an upbeat and dense driving force. Actually, the most remarkable feature of the album is its almost narcotic gentleness, particularly achieved on See the Light, Morning Hollow, and the title track, which closes the album with ten minutes of serene atmospherics.

A part of the album’s material consists of rare, previously released tracks

If you are fond of beautifully arranged, mysterious unpredictable indie rock with contemplative sorrow in it, you will find the ideas of Sparklehorse at least curious. Stolen sunshines, beautiful widows, wonderful lives: for Mark Linkous it is a sad and beautiful world. The reasons that made Linkous delay the album’s release was in his pitiless depression, professional and personal frustrations. And in the end this very things has formed another great Sparklehorse record. Still there is one strange little thing: almost half of Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain has been previously released in some alternate capacity like soundtracks or compilations, and two of the record’s tracks, the driving rocker Ghost in the Sky and mournful Morning Hollow are serving as B-sides for 2001’s It’s a Wonderful Life. But this in no way affects the quality and advantages of Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain. Maybe the name Mark Linkous is hardly synonymous with prolific, but it has nothing to deal with phrase knows-nothing-about-music either.