About a year ago I was watching the video for Paul McCartney's 1980 song
"Coming Up," in which he uses the magic of primitive greenscreen to
simultaneously play the roles of ten members of a band called "the
Plastic Macs" (while Linda McCartney plays two others). One of Paul's
ersatz band members is a guy with slicked-back hair and a little mustache
who slaps robotically at the keyboard while glancing around in sinister
fashion. Here's a screenshot:
I poked around online to find some kind of key, and learned that while
most of the characters in the video were meant to represent archetypes
rather than individual people, this guy was an exception: he was meant to
be someone named Ron Mael from a band called Sparks. Some late-'70s
Kraftwerk knock-off, I gathered. I didn't investigate further.
Then, earlier this summer, I was doing a Sporcle quiz about songs that
hit the top of the Billboard chart in the '80s. One of 1981's
#1s, I knew, was a medley called "Stars on 45"
"Stars on 45" (excerpt)
by a Dutch band of the same name — but after
finishing the quiz, and getting that answer correct, it occurred to me
that I'd never actually heard the record. So I pulled it up on Youtube,
and while it played I read up on it. It turns out that, due to legal
requirements, every song in the medley had to appear in the title, and
therefore that title wound up being by far the longest ever to hit #1:
"Medley: Intro 'Venus' / Sugar Sugar / No Reply / I'll
Be Back / Drive My Car / Do You Want to Know a Secret / We
Can Work It Out / I Should Have Known Better / Nowhere Man /
You're Going to Lose That Girl / Stars on 45" (whew!). But, I then
read, the Stars on 45 gang failed to credit one of the songs they briefly
threw into the mix: "Beat the Clock"
• "Beat the Clock" (edit)
by Sparks. Hmm, Sparks again! I went to the Stars on 45 web site and
discovered that, interestingly enough, the little "you gotta beat the
clock, you gotta beat the clock" part had been excised from the clip that
autoplayed — suggesting that there'd been some wrangling over
the rights. This was now the second time I had encountered a reference
to this Sparks band, so I thought I'd check out this "Beat the Clock." I
dug it enough that my next stop was the Sparks page on Wikipedia.
There I learned that this wasn't a "late '70s band," but one that
had been continuously active from 1968 to the present. I listened to some
of the clips and started to realize that I'd made a much bigger discovery
than I'd anticipated. Every song was in a different genre! The
thing that had always wowed me about the Beatles, even more than the
individual songs, was the way that they'd evolved over time —
that the band that had kicked off its career with
"Love Me Do"
had gone on to do "Yesterday" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" and
"Revolution 9." Now here was a band that had started releasing
albums the year after the Beatles split up, and had gone on to track,
and often to pioneer, the evolution of popular music over the subsequent
forty years — and counting! — and yet, from
the time I started getting into music at age nine until I ran across that
Paul McCartney video at age 36, I'd never heard of these guys. I
was dumbfounded. Then I read that, back in 2008, Sparks had premiered
their 21st album by playing 21 shows in 21 nights, each night playing a
different one of their albums, in sequence,
from start to finish.
And given that I'm the sort of person who can't even watch a friggin'
movie unless it's part of some grand project, I found myself taken with
the idea of doing something similar from the listening end: getting
acquainted with each album sequentially, listening to it over and over
for a couple of days and then moving onto the next, and thereby
compressing four decades of Sparks fandom into six weeks. So that's
what I did.
(A quick note before I get underway: I recognize that what follows is
pretty much the definition of "too long, didn't read" for most people.
If you just want to take a few minutes to listen to the very highest
points of Sparks' career, try the tracks marked with a red bullet, like
• "Beat the Clock" above.)
Sparks are a band from Los Angeles that paved the way for a diverse
array of better-known acts ranging from Queen (operatic vocals and song
structures) to the Cars (songs based around angular synth lines) to
Depeche Mode (took Sparks album #8 as their bible) to They Might Be Giants
(goofy song premises that appeal to nerds) to Green Day (California band
pretending to be British). The band was formed in the late '60s, under
the name Halfnelson, by a bunch of UCLA students: songwriter Ron Mael on
keyboards, his brother Russell on vocals, their friend Earle Mankey on
guitar, and, par for the course for bands starting out, a couple of
different dudes on drums. Earle Mankey brought his brother James in to
play bass, and having attracted the attention of producer Todd Rundgren
with a demo tape, they soon recorded their first album:
"Roger" (excerpt)
"Fa La Fa Lee" (excerpt)
"Slowboat" (excerpt)
"Biology 2" (excerpt)
"(No More) Mr. Nice Guys"
• "Fletcher Honorama"
Halfnelson, 1971 (later re-released as Sparks)
genre: experimental power pop
I knew before I started this project that Kimono My House was
generally considered Sparks' breakthrough album, so I wasn't expecting
much from this one. In my experience, when a band comes to my attention
with its second or third record and I get all excited about checking out
its first effort, it turns out that there was a very good reason that the
band hadn't come to my attention until its second or third record. But
while Halfnelson does have the thin sound that tends to mark debut
albums, it's not only an impressive calling card but actually one of the
best Sparks records.
I've listed this as "experimental power pop," and that means two things.
First, some of the songs push the envelope all by themselves —
listen to the clip from "Roger," for instance, which reminded me of
something Cardiacs might have done. But it also foreshadows Sparks'
career by genre-hopping from song to song, from the proto-New Wave of
"Fa La Fa Lee" to the conventional "Slowboat" (which could easily be a
Neil Diamond song) to the very strange "Biology 2" (presaging such Nirvana
songs as "Curmudgeon" and "Oh, the Guilt," built around a short, sludgy
riff) to the rockin' "Mr. Nice Guys." Then there's the big standout on
the album, a slice of concentrated gorgeousness called "Fletcher Honorama"
that sounds to me like the greatest song George Harrison never wrote.
A rare case of a Sparks album resembling its predecessor, A Woofer
in Tweeter's Clothing differs from Halfnelson primarily in
its unevenness: while Halfnelson was a solid album all the way
through, Woofer has some real gems but also a few clunkers (among
them a cover of "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music). We also see
here the flowering of Ron Mael's penchant for offbeat song premises.
"Girl from Germany," for instance, is about a guy whose Teutonic
ladyfriend inadvertently gives his parents WWII flashbacks, while "Here
Comes Bob" is about a lonely fellow who deliberately causes car accidents
as a way to strike up conversations — and is an odd composition
to boot, heavy on strings and sung in a pinched accent. I've read that
foremost among Sparks' influences when they were starting out were the
Who, and while I can see the influence, it's not "My Generation" or "I
Can See for Miles" that spring to mind, but the period when, in Pete
Townshend's words, "the Who went slightly mad" and put out a record that
I consider in many ways the ultimate Who song, "Dogs":
"Dogs"
Other standouts on Woofer include its best song, the atmospheric
"Moon Over Kentucky," and a song called "Underground" that would not only
have fit in nicely on The Who Sell Out but would have been one of
its high points.
Sparks had played to far larger audiences on its U.K. tour than it ever
had back home in L.A., so in 1973 Island Records offered the Maels a deal
to relocate to England... but just the Maels. After much thought, they
accepted, leaving behind their guitarist, bassist, and drummer —
i.e., what in most circles would be considered "an entire band" —
and recruited new ones on the other side of the pond. This served notice
as to where the band's musical priorities lay: yes, they might rock out on
occasion, but henceforth the songs would be built around Russell's vocals
and Ron's lyrics, melodies, and keyboard lines. Their shows would also
play off the contrast between Russell, with his flowing mane and gaudy
outfits, hyperactively bouncing around the stage, and Ron, with his
necktie, slicked-back hair, and
toothbrush mustache,
staring around unnervingly while remaining anchored to the spot.
For their first British release, Sparks set the genre-hopping aside and
put out a record that was lush glam rock from start to finish. The
reaction in the U.K. was very positive, as the album went to #4 and singles
"This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" hit #2 and "Amateur Hour"
made it to #7. In the U.S., Sparks remained almost entirely unknown and
the album failed to crack the top 100 (peaking at, yes, #101); even the
magnificent "This Town" went nowhere.
Kimono My House did become one of those records whose influence
outstrips their initial popularity, an example of the old saw that only a
few people bought it but everyone who did started a band. Kurt Cobain,
for instance, cited it as one of his favorite albums of all time, and one
lesson he clearly learned was that you don't need intelligible lyrics to
score a huge hit. Russell Mael transformed the lengthy lyrics to "This
Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" into a fusillade of syllables that
no one could follow without a cheat sheet, much as MTV eventually started
playing the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video with subtitles. Now, this
is fine by me — I generally don't care about lyrics,
so long as they don't actually make me cringe for
one reason or
another.
But what's interesting is that the lyrics to these songs aren't at all
generic — the amusing scenarios they present are clearly meant
to be a big part of the value listeners get out of the songs. Check out
some of these premises:
"Here in Heaven": a lament from a boy whose girlfriend didn't follow
through on their suicide pact. "It is hell / Knowing that your
health / Will keep you out of here / For many many years"
"Hasta Mañana, Monsieur": Sparks' take on the Beatles'
"Michelle," as the language barrier gets in the way of the singer's
attempt to court a foreign lass. "I tried to tell you in the night /
That with a girl like you I could do without guided tours / You tried
to tell me in the day / That your leading exports were textiles and
iron ore"
"Amateur Hour": Here it's not the premise so much as the execution
that merits applause. There've been lots of songs about adolescence and
sexual inexperience, but how many have summed up puberty with immortal
lines like "Girls grow tops to go topless in"?
"Thank God It's Not Christmas": the holiday season is here, and
our singer is very glad Christmas itself hasn't yet arrived because it's
the one day he has to spend with his wife.
"Equator": yes, this actually is about a guy freaking out because he
has gone to the equator to rendezvous with his crush, only to realize that
she never did give him a longitude.
It's a delightful assortment, but would have been entirely lost on me
without the services of lyricsvip.com. Take "Equator," for instance:
by the time he gets to "Surely we said it was 3 p.m. / Surely
we said it was March the 10th," Russell has reached a vocal range
that only bats can hear. Which isn't a criticism — it's
actually kind of awesome when he hits those notes. But if we're supposed
to catch the words without already knowing what they are... not so much.
In any case, though the brilliance does peter out a bit toward the end,
this is a great record and definitely the album to pick up if you're only
going to get one (a conundrum that was much more common back in the CD
era, I guess).
Amazingly, Sparks weren't even done with 1974, as they put out yet
another album before the year was up. As with Woofer,
Propaganda is uneven compared to its predecessor, and is sort of
a transitional album leading from the glam rock of Kimono to the
very weird Indiscreet that would follow in '75. You've got songs
like "Reinforcements" (generally good, but occasionally veering a bit
too close to "I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay") and "Achoo" (yes, a song
built around sneezing). Still, Propaganda has some great songs on
it, including what I think may be the best Sparks song of them all, "Don't
Leave Me Alone with Her" (for another contender, see below —
far below) and the much gentler but also very good "Never Turn Your Back
on Mother Earth," which was the biggest single off the album. Even the
weaker songs tend to have redeeming facets, such as the
lovely little keyboard part in "B.C."
I don't think I can do a better job explaining how strange this album is
than simply by having you listen to "Pineapple" over on the left there.
Now, I think we can all agree that "Pineapple" is flippin' awesome;
unfortunately, the rest of the album is a bit of a misfire. Sure, there
are some other good songs, like the proto-New Wave "Happy Hunting Ground"
(the most conventional song on the record, about a guy who, in the
immortal words of John Allison, "can't deal with a world where girls
aren't 19"). I kind of like the marching band song, "Get in the Swing,"
and the herky-jerky "In the Future." But a lot of these songs are
early-20th-century pastiches; the best of these is probably "Looks,
Looks, Looks," but the others aren't to my taste at all.
That being the case, I guess it's kind of lucky that none of the Sparks
albums from 1975 to 1979 bear the slightest resemblance to one another...
Between Indiscreet and Big Beat, the Maels decided that glam
rock had run its course and returned to the U.S., once again recruiting an
all new backing band. They then proceeded to upset their British fans by
completely changing their sound. It was 1976, KISS was all the rage, the
Ramones had attracted a fair amount of buzz in New York, and Sparks
accordingly whipped up an album's worth of big dumb rock. Gone was
Russell's trademark falsetto. Gone were the eccentric lyrics, replaced by
parodic versions of big dumb rock lyrics, e.g., "You fell for me, I fell
for you / You think I'm great, I think you're good / And that's
enough to prove the point once more / Everybody's stupid, that's
for sure" (followed by endless repetitions of "Everybody's stupid, that's
for sure / Oh yeah!"). And gone, sadly, were most of the hooks.
See, by all rights this ought to be my favorite Sparks record. Much as
I have come to be a Sparks fan over the past couple of months, my real
favorite bands are outfits like Die Mannequin and Jack Off Jill that can
blow your speakers out. There is one awesome song on Big Beat,
"Nothing to Do" — so Ramonesy that Joey Ramone tried to
convince the others to cover it — but its awesomeness lies in
elements that aren't Sparks' traditional strengths: above all else, it's
the four long, jaw-dropping drum fills that lead into the choruses, with
second place going to the bass part. If you could take the genius of
"Nothing to Do"'s rhythm section and marry it to the hooks of the
Kimono songs, you would have nothing short of godhead... but
instead the rawwk mostly goes to waste on songs that are, sadly, quite
dull.
With the arena rock sound having turned out to be a flop, Sparks switched
directions yet again and came back with a shimmery bubblegum record in
which the Mael brothers pay unmistakable homage to their fellow Southern
Californians, the Wilson brothers. The pastiche goes right down to the
accent Russell uses: after years of pretending to be British, listen to
how hard he hits those r's on the chorus of "Ladies." Of course, this
wouldn't be Sparks if they didn't subvert things in some way, so a song
like "Over the Summer" is about how summer is awesome not because of the
surfing but because the girl the singer has a crush on grew breasts during
it.
The six Beach Boys homages/parodies (including a standout track called
"Occupation," a guilty pleasure if ever there was one) bracket three
interesting songs that show off Sparks' diversity: the stark rocker "I'm
Not"; a song called "Forever Young" that skewers every other song that's
expressed that sentiment ("I just refuse to be what I'm not this
instant"); and "Goofing Off," which takes banal lyrics about how great
weekends are and marries them to a frickin' Cossack dance, throwing in
some of the very best guitar work ever to appear on a Sparks record.
The results are unexpectedly glorious.
Yes, it was quite a shock for fans of the glam-rock Sparks to pick up
Big Beat. And those who got into Sparks by hearing tracks from
Big Beat in the movie Rollercoaster were nonplussed by the
shift to close harmonies. But nothing in Sparks' career can match the
whiplash between the end of their seventh record and the beginning of
their eighth:
"Those Mysteries" (excerpt)
"Tryouts for the Human Race"
In between those two records, Sparks had decamped to Germany to team up
with producer Giorgio Moroder, who had pioneered what would become the
sound of the '80s and who would go on to write or co-write such hits as
Blondie's "Call Me," Irene Cara's "Flashdance," and Berlin's "Take My
Breath Away." This time the Maels didn't need to find a new guitarist
when they switched continents, because there were no guitars: the
instrumentation on the new album would consist entirely of synthesizers
and drums. With an average song length of over five and a half minutes,
they could only squeeze six songs onto the entire album —
six songs with Russell's falsetto back again and swooping through a
lush sonic landscape.
As far as the British public was concerned, this was Sparks' big comeback
album, and it spawned three successful singles — all radio
edits, as nearly all Sparks singles would be from this point on. This
is one of the areas where Sparks and I are at odds: I think that in
general the optimal length for a pop song is two minutes flat, and while
there are songs that need to clock in at six, Sparks' songs don't usually
qualify. They're way too long. Thus it stands to reason that, while I
think all six songs on this record are quite good, I like them very nearly
in order from shortest to longest: "Beat the Clock," whose video appears
in the introduction to this article, is best, and if forced to break a tie
for second, I might well go for "My Other Voice," which presages
Björk's Homogenic by eighteen years.
(And, yes, "Tryouts for the Human Race" is about sperm.)
Rank among Sparks albums:
2
"When I'm With You" (edit)
"The Greatest Show on Earth"
"Stereo" (excerpt)
Terminal Jive, 1980
genre: early '80s adult contemporary
And now we've reached the album with far and away Sparks' biggest hit,
"When I'm With You," which was #1 for six weeks... in France. It was
their only hit in France, placing Sparks among the biggest one-hit wonders
in French history: « Toute ma jeunesse ! » sigh
the 45-year-old French commenters on Youtube. It also did virtually
nothing else anywhere. It's definitely one of Sparks' less challenging
tracks, a tune that one can easily imagine playing in a dentist's office,
livened up by a catchy synth line that snakes through the whole song.
The same holds true of the album in general, or at least the second half
(the rest of the first half is eminently skippable). The songs are very
much middle-of-the-road affairs, but goosed by a bit of synth and made
reasonably catchy. You've got "The Greatest Show on Earth," probably the
best song on the record; "Young Girls," an ode to chasing jailbait ("Young
girls / Haven't seen the whole night / And they will hold
you / Though it might not be tight"); "Noisy Boys," paving the way
for Wham!; and "Stereo," suggesting the three New Wave albums to come.
Whomp That Sucker is the closest Sparks would come to their
experimental power pop period for a while. It's one of Sparks' three
New Wave albums, but each of those records is a little different. This
one, the best one, is more rock-inflected than the two to come, and has
two other distinct characteristics: one, a deliberately shrill chorus of
backup vocals (check out "Tips for Teens" and "Where's My Girl"), and two,
songs with a diverse set of weird hooks reminiscent of Halfnelsona million ten years before (I could list every
track, but try on "That's Not Nastassia" and "Wacky Women" for size).
This was the first Sparks record to sell better in the U.S. than anywhere
else, and there's a reason for that. In 1981, there was a radio station
in Los Angeles that was looking for bands, especially L.A. bands, that
played a distinctly '80s style of music and that hadn't yet made the big
time, so the listeners could feel like they were tuned in to something
underground, alternative, cutting-edge... even as they and everyone else
on their block plastered their cars' bumpers with these stickers:
KROQ put Whomp That Sucker into its rotation, and while that
wasn't enough to break Sparks outside of L.A. in 1981, it did bring them
to the attention of radio and TV people who kept their eyes peeled for
their next release...
Nearly a decade after making it big in the U.K., Sparks finally made a
splash in the U.S. — enough of a splash to end up on
Saturday Night Live, at least:
"Mickey Mouse" (live)
The big single off Angst in My Pants was "I Predict," which was
basically a novelty song, mocking the tabloids: "Lassie will prove that
Elvis and her had a fleeting affair" and suchlike. (Weird Al Yankovic
did the same sort of thing a couple of years later with "Midnight Star.")
In fact, the whole album is basically a string of joke songs about silly
stuff, from the title track (about unwanted erections) to "Nicotina" (the
best song musically, despite being about a sentient cigarette) to
"Moustache" (in which Ron goes on the record about his toothbrush
mustache, which he would soon ditch at long last). But set aside the
goofy lyrical content and you've got a satisfying slice of pure New Wave,
if that's what you're in the mood for. The album does close with an
uncharacteristic song called "Eaten by the Monster of Love" that also
appeared on the Valley Girl soundtrack, and apparently that
is therefore the one Sparks song a lot of people know. And we're not
even close to the end of the list of "the one Sparks song a lot of people
know"!
Sparks' popularity peaked in the U.S. with this one, which reached (ulp)
#88 and whose big single, "Cool Places," went all the way to #49 —
thanks in large part to guest vocals by Russell Mael's girlfriend at the
time, Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go's. (They had joined forces, Russell told
Dick Clark on American Bandstand, out of "mutual admiration for
each other's respective groups, and then... mutual admiration for each
other's... bodies.") The rest of the album revolves around the same
theme, relating satirical tales of characters in search of coolness,
popularity, and hedonism — obsessions of the '80s to go with
the sounds of the '80s. ("Prayin' for a Party" has a big dumb guitar
riff that sounds like a parody of Joan Jett, and "All You Ever Think About
Is Sex" is Sparks in Depeche Mode, uh, mode.)
This is still a New Wave album, but as noted, it's a different species of
New Wave from the others. While Angst in My Pants featured a
staccato boom-clack-book-clack beat, stark production, and synth and
guitar lines that were alternately searing and jerky, sometimes with
synth washes in the background, In Outer Space substitutes busy
sequenced patterns. Listen to the "dee dee doo doo dee dee doo" that
runs through "Popularity," for example... and get used to it, because
Sparks wouldn't drop it for nearly 20 years.
The first time I listened to Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat,
Elizabeth happened to be in the next room, and I had to ask: "Is it just
me, or did that kind of suck?" The first song, which was the title track,
I liked a lot — between this and "Nicotina," it seems clear
that I tend to go for each record's most
bombastic
offering. But as for the rest of the album... if you tuned to some
backwater cable channel that was showing some forgotten '80s movie, this
utterly generic synthpop is what you'd hear on the soundtrack.
My opinion is no longer so negative — after the songs had a
chance to grow on me, they no longer sound quite so generic. I would go
so far as to call some of them pretty good '80s synthpop. "With All My
Might," the first single, would have been a fine addition to my sixth
grade graduation party, and "Progress" sounds a bit like an off-brand
version of Prince's "I Would Die 4 U," which I liked at the time.
"Sisters" and "Kiss Me Quick," the last two tracks with vocals, aren't
bad either. I later had to ask Lizzie, "Is it just me, or was that kind
of good?"
As mentioned, there are quite a few songs in Sparks' catalogue that a lot
of people cite as the one Sparks song they know, so let's throw one more
onto the heap. "Music That You Can Dance To," the title track from this
album, went higher than another other Sparks song went on a U.S. chart...
#6, on the club play chart. Sigh. Sparks do love to genre-hop,
and it was only a matter of time before they landed in a genre I dislike.
So far they've managed to largely avoid rap and country, at least.
This album isn't completely without merit. I like "Modesty Plays," a
bombastic reworking of their 1982 theme song to a Modesty Blaise TV show
that never got produced. And "Shopping Mall of Love," piling samples on
top of each other to make a dissonant, minimalist sonic collage, hints
at the turn Sparks would make in the 21st century — but we're
still at 1986, so that's a fair way off...
Same story as Rabbits, only moreso. At least Rabbits was
an artifact of 1984, about whose music I was occasionally nostalgic;
Interior Design was from 1988, whose music made me listen to
Led Zeppelin instead. The first few times I listened to this I was
sure that I could mark it in as the worst Sparks album. And
yet, again like Rabbits, it managed to grow on me somehow! I
thought the only clip I would be providing, just to give a taste of
the record, would be from "So Important," but no — let's
throw in "Love-O-Rama," "A Walk Down Memory Lane," and, oh hell, why
not "Stop Me If You've Heard This Before" too?
After releasing fifteen albums in less than eighteen years, Sparks took
their first extended break from that particular grind, working instead on
a musical adaptation of a Japanese comic called Mai the Psychic
Girl. They were out of action from 1989 to 1993, which just so
happens to coincide with the period that Nirvana was putting out records.
Too bad — I would have liked to have heard the Sparks grunge
album. Instead, when Sparks did return, it was with a '90s update of the
club music they turned out in Music That You Can Dance To, with a
rapid beat added that was presaged in Outer Space. This was a
sound that was out of fashion in the U.S., but big in Europe —
specifically, big in Germany, where Sparks wound up #1 in airplay for 1994
with "When Do I Get to Sing My Way." The follow-up was "I Hear Charlie
Parker Playing," and, man, listening to it you can just see the Roxbury
guys nodding their heads in unison.
This was also billed as Sparks' comeback in the U.K., where interviewers
blithely asked the Maels what they'd been up to since— no, not since
Interior Design. Since "Beat the Clock." Their usual answer was
"getting heard of in the U.S." (I guess that sounds more impressive than
"becoming one-hit wonders in France.")
By 1997 Sparks had been putting out music for over a quarter of a century.
They had American fans unfamiliar with their '70s work, British fans
unfamiliar with their '80s work, and German fans unfamiliar with both.
The obvious solution would be a best-of album, but the Maels decided to
tweak the concept a bit. Instead of simply compiling their greatest hits,
they remade them, sometimes bringing in bands they'd influenced (Faith No
More, Erasure) as collaborators.
I'm not going to rank this album — it's too weird a case. In
a sense, it should be #1, because it's got a lot of Sparks' best songs all
in one place... but in another sense, it should be #22, because it's the
one I'm the least interested in. In every case, I'd rather listen to the
original song than the remake, so since I've got the other 21 albums, why
bother with this one? As a representative clip I'll put up a chunk of the
orchestral remake of "Rabbits," just because it'll be important later.
If Introducing Sparks is Sparks doing the Beach Boys, then
Balls is Sparks doing The Prodigy. It's the same repetitive
dance music as on Gratuitous Sax, but with some fried-sounding
guitar samples added to the mix. The title track isn't bad, but
otherwise this one has to join its predecessor at the bottom of the
heap.
Sparks' most recent big swerve wasn't quite as sharp a break as the one
between Introducing Sparks and No. 1 in Heaven.
Minimalism had been part of their repertoire as far back as "Shopping
Mall of Love." Classical orchestration had shown up on Plagiarism.
Still, it seems unlikely that anyone anticipated that Sparks' next move
after Balls would be to pack up the electronica that had dominated
their music since 1979 and break out the pianos and violins. Seriously,
imagine that you've been a fan of Sparks since hearing them at your
favorite Berlin discotheque eight years ago, or watching them on MTV in
your family room in Pacific Palisades nineteen years ago, or catching
their show in London twenty-eight years ago, and you put on their new
record, and the first thing you hear is this:
"The Rhythm Thief"
And then it turns out that this track is no outlier; pretty much the whole
record consists of Russell repeating the same phrases over an orchestral
backing track. "My Baby's Taking Me Home" takes this to extremes,
repeating the title dozens upon dozens of times and using no other words
other than a short spoken-word piece — and yet it works! I
can't agree with critics who called Lil' Beethoven a
masterpiece — the songs are generally too long, and some of
those in the first half aren't particularly interesting. The same sort
of thing can be said about Sparks' other albums of the 2000s: they're
uneven, often quite flabby... but studded with absolute gems. On this
one, take "Ugly Guys with Beautiful Girls," one of my favorites in the
Sparks catalogue — possibly my very favorite, depending on my
mood. It's— wait, you know what? I don't want to spoil it, any more
than I'd want to spoil its spiritual cousin, R.E.M.'s "Leave." But let me
just ask: how many of the grayhairs going to the endless reunion shows of
Sparks' contemporaries, like the Eagles or the Doobie Brothers, would say,
"Yep, I think their best song is this one from 2002"?
Like I said in the introduction, I find this constant reinvention really
fascinating. It is something that this band has gathered a new following
on five occasions: Britain in 1974, France in 1980, the U.S. in 1982-3,
Germany in 1994, and with Lil' Beethoven in 2002, the Internet.
For ever since I mentioned that I'd started listening to Sparks, people
online have been messaging and tweeting me about them, and this is the
record they mention. How many bands can say they won a new generation
of fans with their nineteenth album?
While I'm here, I want to say something about the concluding track,
"Suburban Homeboy." It's one of the better songs on the album. Yet the
lyrics ("I am a suburban homeboy and I say 'Yo, dogg' to my pool-cleaning
guy") aren't exactly groundbreaking comedy. They're pretty standard Weird
Al fare. Frickin' P.D.Q. Bach had done something pretty similar over a
decade earlier. (Ugh.) But there's a key difference. See, Weird Al and
P.D.Q. Bach and other Dr. Demento regulars are careful to enunciate,
because the jokes are the whole point of the song. Russell Mael doesn't.
As with the songs on Kimono, the words are just about impossible to
make out without a lyric sheet. But it doesn't matter. The strength of
the song lies in the catchy melody and instrumentation. That's what makes
it good despite the fact that the central joke is pretty tired. When I
said that I'd be doing a Sparks writeup, I got a few replies from people
saying that they were looking forward to what I thought of this theme and
that theme, and I'm afraid the answer is that I didn't think much of
anything because I don't pay much attention to lyrics. What I have
trapped in my head after listening to these songs, or any songs, is
basically, "La, la da da-da da DA da, la da da da-da dah dee dah, la da
dee dee dah..." (Or "My baby's taking me home, my baby's taking me home,
my baby's taking me home...")
Another winner, as Sparks took the guitars that had come as a surprise
on "Ugly Guys with Beautiful Girls" and applied them more liberally to
their second chamber pop effort. The first track, "Dick Around," is
basically a complete rock opera compressed into six and a half minutes...
yet much as I love it, I'm also partial to the edit that appears in the
video, which cuts out some of the slower sections and goes straight for
the rock. And to watch those rock sections — Dean Menta and
Steve McDonald shredding on guitar and bass, Ron Mael and '00s Sparks
drummer extraordinaire
Tammy Glover
pounding away at their respective instruments, Russell plowing through
the lyrics in inimitable fashion... man, why don't they write more songs
in which they just rock out? For it is awesome when they do.
The other songs on the record are also generally quite good, though
"Perfume" doesn't suffer from its radio edit and several others could
have benefitted from the same treatment. Another standout is "Metaphor,"
which uses the time-honored trick of bringing back the chorus just a
little bit higher than before; as usual, it works. I dig dig d-i-g dig
dig this record.
Rank among Sparks albums:
7
"Lighten Up, Morrissey"
"Good Morning"
"I Can't Believe That You Would Fall for
All the Crap in This Song" (excerpt)
This brings me back to my first tweet about Sparks a couple of months
ago: "How many other bands can say they put out great songs in 1971 and
2008?" Because "Fletcher Honorama" off Halfnelson was a great
song, and so is "Lighten Up, Morrissey" off this one. (Morrissey is
actually a pal of the Maels; the song is about a guy who's frustrated
because he's dating a Morrissey fangirl who thinks that the singer
doesn't measure up to her icon.)
This is a pretty solid album all the way through, though as with its
'00s predecessors, it's a bit flabby; even the best songs tend to be
one musical idea repeated for over four minutes when two would have
sufficed. Highlights include "Good Morning" (sung entirely in the
falsetto that Russell somehow can summon even at age 60+); another tune
heavy on the fuzzbox, "I Can't Believe That You Would Fall for All the
Crap in This Song"; and the soaring "I've Never Been High" —
but even these could have been trimmed a bit. Ah well.
It'd be nice to wrap this up on a high note, with Sparks' return to top
form on albums 19 through 21, but I do have to attach this coda. Sparks
were contacted by Sweden's national radio network, which wanted to
commission a musical from them; they had free rein, with one stipulation:
the result had to have something to do with Sweden. The Maels, both of
whom had studied film back at UCLA, selected Ingmar Bergman as their
subject, setting forth a tale of the dour director being courted by
Hollywood.
Pete Townshend always said of his rock operas that anyone could write
the opera part, but the trick was writing the rock songs to go with it.
The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman barely has any songs at all; it's
mostly shapeless film-score music with some vocals on top, some sung,
some spoken. Half the vocals are in Swedish. Russell Mael barely
appears. When he does, it's the highlight of the album, so naturally
that's what I've attached. Don't get your hopes up; it's not
characteristic.
Rank among Sparks albums:
21
So there you have it — the saga of one of the greatest bands
of the last half century, on the same tier as the Beatles and the Who in
quality, and with a rich and varied history surpassing that of those
legendary acts... and of whom I'd somehow never heard until just now.
So who else has flown beneath my radar for all this time?
