Sparklehorse - 'Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain' (Parlophone) Released 25/09/06

It's been five years since Sparklehorse last released an album, and a sizable chunk of the extended gestation period must have been spent dreaming up new ways to decorate and disguise mainstay Mark Linkous' vocals. An electronically tweaked falsetto on one track, a helium-hogging wind-up toy on another, on first exposure the overtime in vocal production seems to have eaten into manufacturing anything substantial to hang the beguiling aural acrobatics on.

Allow it a while to sink in, though, and the album, Sparklehorse's fourth, soon reveals its deeper secrets. The trademark murk and mystery may be lurking beneath a shinier surface this time around, perhaps due to the subtle electronic enhancements of Dangermouse, who joins US alt. rock sound-scientist supremo Dave Fridkin to twiddle the knobs here, but there's a rich seam of distinctive otherworldliness running through the album's foundations. The tunes, meanwhile, are enough to turn the coolest hipster into a sobbing wreck. Standouts such as the stunning first single 'Don't Take My Sunshine Away' pull off a delicate balance between sun-kissed uplift and crushing despair: shimmering with wary optimism, whilst never denying that the abyss exist, its gaping pit lurking just a few stumbles away. The way the song's warm Beatlesian sparkle crumbles into the middle-eight's vulnerable plead is a moment of heartbreaking beauty, and it's far from the only one of its kind on the album.

Elsewhere, there's bitter-sweet pop ('Mountains', the sweetly sinister 'Shade and Honey') and wounded folk ('Return to Me'), whilst the aching 'Getting It Wrong' is a full flowering of the synthetic electro-soul the weaker bits of the latest Flaming Lips album grasped at and 'See The Light' and 'Knives oO Summertime' marry Crazy Horse's lumpen grooves to psychedelia-tinged pop ala Mercury Rev. Despite the stylistic shifts and multiple pairs of hands at the mixing desk, 'Dreamt for Light Years...' conveys a unified whole, due not least to Linkous' often jaw-dropping lyrics. The focus might be on relationships, but this is far wonkier stuff than standard self-pitying platitudes peddled by legions of lovelorn bards. No wonder Tom Waits, another champion of the ear-catching couplet, is spotted tinkling the ivories amidst the mournful buzz of 'Morning Hollow'.

Only the castrated riffs and Linkous's assimilation of the whingeing whine spotted on countless steaming turds from emo's clogged plumbing on 'It's Not So Hard' misfires. But any lapses of taste are forgiven once the hypnotic title track kicks in. Nothing much happens at a crawling pace – a few narcoleptic chords, sparse piano notes falling like tears, a weeping pedal steel and the odd bleep and crackle – but if this moving ten-minute epic was the soundtrack, being stuck under a massive slab of rock for a light year or two wouldn't be that much of a downer.