Sound founds and samples (a recording of his mother on his answering phone features on ‘ Spirit Ditch’) are woven throughout while the vocals are often distorted, but when the fog clears and a song emerges it is, more often than not, brilliant.

For every delicate rumination on the album, there’s a squall of punk infused thrash guitar outings. Lowery ended up playing on and producing several of the songs on ‘ Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot’ under the pseudonym of David Charles.įrom the start, with Linkous quoting Shakespeare over delicate guitar and subsonic burblings on ‘ Homecoming Queen’, his intimate voice and the nursery like delivery invite the listener into a world where nothing is quite as it seems. When Lowery moved to Richmond, the pair met up and began to work together with the aforementioned ‘ Sick Of Goodbyes’ the first result (The Sparklehorse version is on ‘ Good Morning Spider’). He was drawn to lo fi and “outsider” recordings by the likes of Vic Chesnutt and Daniel Johnson along with Tom Waits’ junkyard hollers while he was also in thrall to the raw view of America as portrayed in the writings of Cormac McCarthy. Disillusioned and with a drug habit, he returned to his native Virginia to lick his wounds and recuperate. Mark Linkous was a Southerner who had tried his hand at stardom in LA in his band The Dancing Hoods in the 80s. Anyhow, once I had this CD in my hands, after trying to decipher the credits, haphazardly printed across a series of seriously weird photographs (think of a collaboration between William Eggleston, David Lynch and John Wayne Gacy), I found that the music contained within was even weirder. Most likely it was via some article regarding Cracker, a band I loved and who had featured a song co-written by Cracker’s David Lowery and Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous (‘ Sick Of Goodbyes’) on their ‘ Kerosene Hat’ album. I can’t recall what exactly led me to purchase ‘ Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot’ back in 1995. The weird and wonderful world of Sparklehorse was fully formed from the start.

Sparklehorse good morning spider rarity