Each Sparklehorse album is a zoo. Animals populate Mark Linkous' lyrics like needles decorate a Lou Reed album. The refreshingly non-ironically titled It's a Wonderful Life finds horseys, monkeys, and donkeys popping up in almost every track. But where Good Morning Spider annouced itself with the bold declaration "I want to be a pig, I want to fuck a cow" (sounding, for all the world, like the best PJ Harvey imitation ever produced by a guy), no such bestial mistreatment occurs on here.

Opening with a brief, animal-strewn overture, the album takes off with "Golden Day," a beautiful paen to a child. It's Linkous' most honest sounding sentimental song to date and it's a triumph. Polly Jean returns the favor of "Pig" by popping up (with John Parish) on two of the albums best songs, "Eyepennies" and "Piano Fire", giving some hope to those who figured she'd thrown her good taste out the window on her last album. "Piano Fire" revels in "circus people with hairy little hands" and declares that "I can't see through marble yellow eyes." The eyes will be stolen by flying monkeys in "Eyepennies" a few songs later, though, so perhaps it's not such a big deal.

Nina Persson of the Cardigans appears on two other songs. While her bubblegum persona might sound like the least welcome addition to those only familiar with "Lovefool", her voice blends exquisitely with Linkous' and she adds a necessary sonic component to each track, even when she's only singing the word "please" on "Apple Bed."

If you've heard Sparklehorse before, the remainder of the album sounds pretty much like you'd expect it to: eery ballads about skeletons, teeth, nails, and birds. Musically this isn't a big departure from the previous two albums, but the exotic instrumentation (optigon, orchestron, chamberlin, and an assortment of unspecified electronics) coalesces here into a beautiful, humming bed of sound, aided in large part by Dave Fridmann's assured production, which makes this the best sounding Sparklehorse album yet. "More Yellow Birds" is the best example of the production: violins, steel guitar, organ, and double-tracked vocals each manage to sound distinct, clear, and warm; at no point is any particular element of the song buried beneath another.

There is a notable dearth of hard-rocking songs: "Piano Fire" is a mellower, more polished reapproach to Sparklehorse's only radio hit "Sometimes;" "King of Nails" keeps its pace just slow enough to prevent you from rocking out to it. The most raucous track is the Tom Waits duet "Dog Door" which sounds like, well, Tom Waits. The album closes--because no zoo is complete without children--with "Babies on the Sun," a bizarre, moog-enhanced space ballad featuring a tape of a speaking child. This is Linkous' most gentle album, and with the emphasis on babies and children ("Comfort Me" includes the line, "dreamed I had me a daughter"), it sounds like he has grown beyond the point where he would, say, get reckless with his tranqs and, perhaps, nod off for half a day until his legs didn't work. For all the zoology, "It's a Wonderful Life" is a mature and confident work.

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