Critic's Corner
Sparklehorse Sparkles on Posthumous Tracks
Wednesday’s shoe-gazing Grunge
Too much Elliott
Sparklehorse, Bird Machine
Indie rock band Sparklehorse released Bird Machine, their newest and final album, on September 8th. It’s the first album the band has put out since the lead singer Mark Linkous died by suicide in 2010. The album itself was recorded in 2009 and was set to drop that year, but then disappeared. Mark’s younger brother Matt was sifting through his late-brother’s boxes of tapes when Matt found the name and track listing for the record.
I've known about Sparklehorse for a while and there were a few songs of theirs that I loved, but I never really went so deep into their discography. When I heard Bird Machine I was definitely pleasantly surprised. Posthumous albums always worry me because it's really hard to understand somebody else's art. But the final product here doesn’t seem to stray at all from what Mark had in mind. His brother …
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy Rides Again
Kentucky Genius-Freak’s Bummer-Folk Masterpieces
Leads Normies into Metaphysical Darkness
Unkempt philosopher-poet Will Oldham will never be at peace
We’ve lived with the Kentucky genius-freak Will Oldham long enough for us to take him for granted, and for his best work to disappear. Johnny Cash covered the title track from I See A Darkness, the bleakest of the American bummer-folk masterpieces that darkened the late 90s, an era when our country had become richer and more powerful than it had been or maybe ever would be again. Naturally, the album is no longer on Spotify. The Letting Go has been similarly let go of — you must turn to YouTube, or, God forbid, physical media to experience Oldham’s 2006 creative peak, a great poet’s cry across the outer and inner wilderness, powered through spare vocal harmonies and a restless churn of guitar.
Oldham, whose latest album was released under his Bonnie Prince Billy alias this past June, is now one of the last survivors of a golden age of existential dark Americana. David Berman, Elliott …
The Magic of Castor Oil Packs
‘Palms of Christ’ have healing powers, known to the Pharaohs
Cultivating castor oil consciousness, with the help of medical mystic Edgar Cayce
The real doctor is you
In the bleak end-of-winter days of March 2013, I found myself reporting a story from a barge on the Mississippi River. The barge was parked near President’s Island, a forlorn peninsula in southwest Memphis blighted by chemical plants and agribusiness operations, where great drifts of garbage accumulate after heavy rains. As we bumped along over the filthy water in a speedboat, my guide pointed out an oil refinery here, a cement factory there, a Cargill corn processing facility on that bank, a coal-fired power plant on another. I noticed that my lungs had begun to burn. The air, which smelled of acrid chemicals and fermented cereal grains, was a toxic soup the likes of which I had never encountered or inhaled.
But I wasn’t going to be a baby, so I ignored the searing sensation in my chest. And then, adding insult to injury, a passenger with a respiratory flu joined our group. Armed with my personal travel …
