Sparklehorse: Bird Machine (digital outlets)

Ol' Bill Shakespeare was overstating it in Julius Caesar when he wrote, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

But we take the general point; the big names get the biggest obituaries, if not comets in the sky.

When famous musicians die – Lennon, Whitney, Amy, Tupac, Bowie et al – there's understandable grief: they arrived like bright comets and their music touched lives.

However artists beyond the global spotlight – Kirsty MacColl, Vic Chesnutt, Elliott Smith, Mark Lanegan – are no less important, but often it's not until their passing do we realise how many they affected.

When 47-year old Mark Linkous of the American indie band Sparklehorse killed himself in 2010 -- four years after a debilitating overdose of booze, Valium and uppers which affected his legs -- his career was reassessed for its diversity and Linkous' collaborations with Tom Waits, P.J. Harvey, Iggy Pop, Nina Persson of the Cardigans and the Bangles' Susanna Hoffs. They too were fans.

Sparklehorse never enjoyed widespread commercial success but Linkous undeniably touched people.

The posthumous Bird Machine, brought together by Linkous' brother Matt from unreleased tapes intended for a fifth Sparklehorse album and embellished by former collaborators, is considerably better and more coherent than its origins suggest.

Linkous might have explored psychic shadowlands – his final album was Dark Night of the Soul with Danger Mouse and numerous collaborators – but his gift was often for profoundly simple pop melodies, as here on the Lennonesque Daddy's Gone, dreamy Evening Star Supercharger (“a train that never blowed, took my legs and I bled out slow”) and behind the distortion of It Will Never Stop (“the crows with their arrows and their little bows”).

There's damaged beauty on the electronica-based Kind Ghosts (“where were you kind ghosts when I needed you?”), veiled menace in the lullaby-like O Child (“here comes the sun and morning's levelled guns”) and self-laceration in the ragged power-pop of I Fucked It Up.

Bird Machine is replete with fractured sadness and, in the spare final fragment Stay (“it’s gonna get brighter”), a reminder of what we lost.

His life and work was like a comet, a brief blaze in the cosmos then fading and fading . . .

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You can hear and buy this album at bandcamp here