The idea of the multiverse has develop into one among science fiction’s hardiest tropes. Like time journey, it faucets into the alluring fantasy that our lives could have turned out a special manner, that perhaps we’ve all obtained a shot at swapping out the sadder, tougher components of our actuality. And given the unhappy and arduous circumstances that surrounded Sparklehorse’s fifth album, it’s tempting to think about how these songs might exist in a barely totally different dimension, one by which Mark Linkous continues to be round to bash out “I Fucked It Up” on some competition stage or apply a extra delicate method to the extra cosmic likes of “All people’s Gone To Sleep”. Alas, that’s not the spot within the multiverse we occupy. As an alternative, the 14 raucous, melancholy, acerbic and elegant songs of Hen Machine – now accomplished by a crew led by Matt Linkous, Mark’s youthful brother and longtime collaborator – arrive cloaked in tragedy and inevitably accompanied by questions on what shapes and trajectories they could have taken had Linkous lived to usher them into the world himself.

When the Sparklehorse singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on March 6, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he left his closing work incomplete. Precisely how unfinished has lengthy been a matter of hypothesis, with many followers presuming that it might by no means see the sunshine of day. Certainly, given how a lot Linkous’s productiveness had declined in his later years, it was honest to consider that solely scraps existed. In any case, his struggles with melancholy and dependancy contributed to a prolonged inventive blockage earlier than he enlisted producer Brian “Hazard Mouse” Burton to assist assemble 2006’s Dreamt For Mild Years In The Stomach Of A Mountain, a lot of which consisted of songs initially left off It’s A Fantastic Life 5 years earlier. His subsequent collaboration with Burton – 2010’s Darkish Night time Of The Soul, whose launch was delayed till after Linkous’s passing resulting from a authorized dispute with EMI – was so crowded with high-profile collaborators, it was typically arduous to discern Linkous’s hand in its creation.

But this restoration job – which Matt Linkous says adheres to his brother’s in depth plans for the album, embrace the monitor sequencing – demonstrates no diminishment of confidence. As an alternative, every little thing about Hen Machine strongly suggests he remained the identical restlessly ingenious artist that he’d been when he known as time on his band Dancing Hoods, left Los Angeles and holed up in a house studio in Richmond, Virginia to make the scratchy, scrappy music that grew to become Sparklehorse’s 1995 debut, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. Most of the songs right here bristle with an vitality that feels very a lot consistent with Matt’s account of the keenness his brother expressed in regards to the work in progress, which he envisioned as a “straight-up pop document”. After all, the larger and typically burlier full-band performances Linkous captured in late 2009 at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago have been adopted by the stranger, typically extra desolate pathways he pursued whereas working by himself in North Carolina at Static King, his longtime residence studio (he had simply relocated it to Knoxville on the time of his dying). All through all of it, Linkous was striving for a steadiness of the various opposites that had at all times animated his music: mild and darkish, easy and ornate, fastidiously managed and gleefully anarchic.

Linkous was even making good on one other ambition he expressed to his brother, which was to take some inspiration from Buddy Holly. True, “It Will By no means Cease” could solely have entered the Crickets’ repertoire in one other of these alternate dimensions but it surely nonetheless opens Hen Machine with a delightful burst of melody, fuzz and rumble. The tune additionally alerts a shift away from the extra tightly constructed and typically constrictive nature of the Hazard Mouse albums towards the extra spontaneous really feel of 1998’s Good Morning Spider. That mentioned, Linkous’s scuffed-up voice all through the album could also be much less of a throwback to how he sounded on Sparklehorse’s earlier albums than a matter of logistical necessity, Linkous having recorded solely tough vocals at greatest.

Linkous could have later determined to current his vocals fairly otherwise – as per the numerous methods he might’ve in the end deviated from his plans – however what survives right here nonetheless works for the fabric, his voice persistently evincing each fragility and a fervent resilience. Although steeped in an ethereal environment, “Type Ghosts” involves feels extra grounded because the gently strummed guitar and multi-tracked vocal harmonies emerge from the murk. “Night Star Supercharger” is even prettier as a gentle-hearted train in psych-country, with Linkous gently expressing his eager for “peace with out capsule, gun or needle”. The lyrics additionally see him discover the metaphor of how a dying star expands earlier than it’s gone, although the richness of the association and fullness of the instrumentation imply the tune doesn’t really feel as lonesome or prophetic because it might need. Against this, “Oh Youngster” feels way more just like the product of profound isolation. “I do know it may be unhealthy/Oh youngster, typically you’ll be unhappy”, he sings over what seems like a battered barroom piano, the air of desolation solely deepening when the tune incorporates a recording of glad chatter from his nephew Spencer.

Although they have been hardly uncommon in Linkous’s writing, the themes of despair and mortality he explores all through Hen Machine inevitably tackle a specific poignance. He returns to a panorama filled with ghosts in “Falling Down”, a mid-tempo, country-tinged magnificence that wouldn’t appear misplaced on Neil Younger’s Harvest Moon. Within the hazily attractive “Hiya Lord” he assumes the angle of one other doable phantom, this time a soldier who questions the massive man upstairs why it’s his lot to battle and die. However Linkous’s caustic sense of humour comes by way of sharply on Hen Machine, too. The punchiest Sparklehorse tune since “Pig”, “I Fucked It Up” is a garage-rock rager by which he makes mild of his personal failures. There’s a equally cavalier spirit to “Chaos Of The Universe” – a sketchier cousin to Good Morning Spider’s “Chaos Of The Galaxy/Comfortable Man” – and his cowl of Robyn Hitchcock’s “Listening To The Higsons”. The latter is one among a number of songs that he could have rightly consigned to B-side standing, but it surely’s enjoyably ragged all the identical.

There’s additionally one thing exhilarating in regards to the grace and wonder he achieves elsewhere, particularly given this artist’s tendency to slash his prettiest canvases (and once more, he might very effectively have carried out the identical if he had the possibility). Two full-band tracks that embrace backing vocals by Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, “All people’s Gone To Sleep” and “The Scull Of Lucia”, evoke The Band at their sweetest and stateliest. On the identical time, they’re a reminder of how idiosyncratic Linkous’s songs could possibly be, with the presence of a budget synths and toy devices that so typically offered his songs with their off-kilter model of attraction.

The wobbly, warbling sound of the Casio SK-1 – one among Linkous’s most beloved items of substances, later bequeathed to The Flaming Lips’ Steven Drozd – is unmistakable in Hen Machine’s nearer, “Keep”. Whereas it’s nonetheless heartbreaking to listen to Linkous promise that “it’s gonna get brighter” with the information of what was to return, there’s extra daylight inside Hen Machine than anybody might’ve anticipated. And as a lot as these songs could also be steeped within the ache of their creator’s life, one of the best music right here occupies a particular place and time, a metaphysical coordinate past that unhappy, arduous actuality we all know too effectively.