Friday 06/10/06 Sparklehorse @ The Cockpit, Leeds

"Cow! Pig! Cow!" Pig!" The crowd chant, keen to voice their opinions on their preferred farm creatures. Instead of a Barnyard Beast of the Year vote at a farmers’ fair, the fauna-flavoured uproar marks the return of a revived US alt. rock institution, who’s now good-humouredly pleading with us to give him a break from animal-themed ditties. 

That the near-capacity audience can call for their favourites by naming a few of our four-legged friends means that none other than Mark Linkous is on the comeback trail. For four revered albums, Linkous's nom de rock Sparklehorse has excelled in moulding a warped world populated by the near-mystical phenomena of nature, lingering ghosts, the click-clacking of horses' hooves, buzzing of bees, web-knitting spiders and an assortment of beaks, wings and paws. Although comparisons to the likes of Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips and Eels have been plentiful, it's an alternative universe unlike anything else, tuning into which is like waking inside a particularly haunting fairy tale brought to vivid life with a schooling in indie rock and the heartbreaking melancholy of, say, sometime collaborator Tom Waits.

The hipster king figure - natty gray suit, carefully tousled hair, shades on throughout the proceedings - on the Cockpit stage is a far cry from the disheveled Linkous of yesteryear, the fag dangling from the corner of his mouth presumably the only remaining vice from an exhaustive list of recreational pursuits that sent the songwriter into self-imposed rural exile for five years. Having finally broken his silence, you'd expect Linkous to trumpet his return by littering the setlist with choice selections from the superb new Sparklehorse LP 'Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly of A Mountain'. Instead, he wades waist-deep into his back catalogue, leaving the vast majority of the magnificent new material on the shelf, a move that undermines the considerable charms of the remarkable latest album. 

On record, Sparklehorse conjure an enchanting web of hazy beauty that provides a pitch-perfect accompaniment for the unsettling atmosphere of Linkous’s songs by combining ingredients as elemental as the mountains the lyrics frequently refer to - wailing pedal steels, tenderly plucked acoustic instrumentation - with distinctly modern electronic tweaking, hiss and hum. Tonight, he and his four outstandingly flexible cohorts ditch any experimental impulses by opting for a spare, muscular approach peppered with frequent outbreaks of fretboard wrestling. It's electrifying stuff, not far removed from the plodding grooves of Neil Young's Crazy Horse, but from an act renowned for unleashing breathtakingly harmonious unions of teary-eyed desolation and the sweet ache of wary optimism it's a bit underwhelming, akin to watching Superman dial 999 instead of dealing with the impending disaster himself. 

None of which matters a jot to the long-term followers, sent into reverie by the abundance of classic material in the cruelly short set. Even those of less evangelical persuasion pipe down once the sound lifts off to near-symphonic shimmer on highlights such as 'Sad And Beautiful World', the title of which offers a summary of the realm Linkous's songs occupy. The celebratory gig culminates in the fragile encore 'Homecoming Queen', which Linkous hands over for the adoring audience to bark, most likely as a touching thank you for not abandoning him during his lengthy absence. 

With resistance-melting material like this, Linkous could take a 50 years break, and there'd still be a queue for tickets on his return.