The problem with Sparks is that while brothers Ron and Russell Mael have never gone unnoticed, he has to explain why they matter, even though so few people seem to have heard of them: They impressed David Bowie and Queen, they became favourites. Depeche Mode, the Pet Shop Boys, and his Kimono (my home) changed Björk’s life, just to name a few. And the good news is that despite their long adventure, Sparks is alive and well: God, they’ve been in it since 1971, and their new album is #26 in their discography.
The girl cries with a certain clash of moods in her latte games, because the melancholy of the title (the scene of the girl crying in a cafeteria full of people) meets a highly extroverted, elite, and high-pitched content. licenses with dignity. After a notable album cycle, a deal with Franz Ferdinand that brought them closer to other audiences, and the soundtrack to the movie Annette alongside a lauded documentary (Edgar Wright’s The Sparks brothers), the album caught them at a good time. (Leos Carax) gave them a César award.
old hollywood
The proud remnants of those tribal rhythms and powerful guitars are so typical of the grandeur that saw them born that it remains as these gentlemen from Los Angeles did. There’s the title track (in her video, another celebrity fan, Cate Blanchett, is dancing) and it’s just as faded or more faded. Nothing’s as good as they say. Two big cucumbers, Veronica Lake and Escalator, a tribute to old Hollywood noir films, both of which stand somewhere between Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, contrasting with the cybernetic attacks of other crumbling themes.
But as the authors of head-turning tunes such as This Town Is Not Big Enough (1974), Sparks has always been characterized by knowing how to build songs out of canon with eccentric melodies and arrangements that could refer to operetta or pastiche. polishing excess and kitsch. Here we should talk about confident pieces such as the late-night imperial crescendo of the Mona Lisa, the psychopathic orchestral atmosphere of We go dance, or the frenzied musical mood surrounding Take me for a ride.
If you have to be classical and melodic though, it doesn’t have to be that way, stylizing the last part of the playlist that results in a theme by summarizing, Wow, that was fun, which isn’t fun. It seems he only witnesses the end of the disc and not Sparks. A couple that managed to sound fresh, witty and cheeky years later, and before long they were performing at Primavera Sound in Barcelona last Friday.