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04/20/2008 ARTHUR NO. 29 (MAY 2008) NOW IN L.A. AND OTHER PLACES SOON featuring... Chris Ziegler and Kevin Ferguson visit veteran sui generis pop duo SPARKS in L.A. as they prepare to perform their entire 20-album, 240-song ouevre in a single three-wek London engagement in May. We''re actually better than we thought, reveal the brothers Mael. Plus: an appropriately outsized ''Listener''s guide to Sparks'' by Ned Raggett. With photography by Jeaneen Lund.
Sparks Talk Progress, Structure, Evolution in Anticipation of Their Royce Hall Concert
Over three decades, L.A.''s reigning kings of avant pop, Sparks, have reinvented their music countless times. Theyll prove it at Royce Hall on Valentines Day
By John Payne
Published on February 10, 2009 at 11:39pm
The enduring, eternally resurrecting art that spills from (the one, the only) Sparks, L.A.s kings of the cleverest of pop, is something to behold: The sibling pair has, for 30-odd years, defined and continually redefined its audacious brand of ultradramatic (in a funny sort of way), progressive and wickedly wordy pop music. It has tickled our brains, dictated fist pumps and made us go woooo.
In fact, Sparks have been on a roll over the past half-decade, offering a spate of critical and semicommercial successes that started to flow copiously with the release of the extraordinary, revolutionary Lil Beethoven in 2004. A curiously powerful and radical restructuring of rock into a drum-free world of elaborately layered vocals and keyboards in rhythmic, almost looplike modes, the record spun out harmonized and hilarious tales of angry young bands and ugly guys with beautiful girls. Lil Beethoven changed the very shape of the rock song, showed us how it potentially could continue to evolve while continuing to, well, rock.
The 2006 follow-up, Hello Young Lovers, further explores this smearing of rock theatricality with facetiously operatic drama. Still relatively drum-lite, Lovers emphasizes elaborate arrangements and thematically linked parts where Russells repetitive vocal laments are used as the primary rhythmic elements, amid Rons lush orchestral-string synths floated above.
Sparks new one is called Exotic Creatures of the Deep, and takes the process of rock even further, deconstructing 13 new songs of enormous grace, style, wit and lan (such as Lighten Up, Morrissey).
Says Ron over coffee at a caf on Melrose, We thought we were making a new start with Lil Beethoven, and we kind of didnt know how far we could go with that general direction. But we still feel that we havent run out of ideas in that general way. Its kind of thinking of songs in a different way than we have. We always wrote songs, and even though they were a little bit eccentric, they were still songs. With Lil Beethoven, we started working in a more musical way, and hoping we could concentrate them into something that had some kind of form that could be seen as a song.
In my notes on the new album are scribbled the words form and structure, because it is quite amazing what Sparks have been achieving in these new pieces: Theyre pop songs, but theyre not or at least theyre much, much more. Theyre breaking boundaries regarding the protraction and mutation of songs. How far can they take it before we concede that theyre actually writing symphonies? These are radical statements but that doesnt seem to worry them.
Because we work in such isolation, says Ron, we never know what the reaction is gonna be to what were doing; and the critical reaction to Lil Beethoven was so strong, and the reaction to our shows was so strong, it was stirring to us and pushed us to take it further than we had before.
Even as the relentlessly good-humored creators of such supremely intelligent quirky-pop from the rocking over-the-top theatrics of albums such as Kimono My House (featuring This Town Aint Big Enough for the Both of Us) and Propaganda in the early 70s to their KROQ-friendly 80s sets like Whomp That Sucker and Angst In My Pants Sparks made with Lil Beethoven a substantial leap that heralded the beginning of a new phase.
We felt it, too, says Russell. It was a conscious attempt to shake it up within our own sphere. You know, when you have that many albums [21, but whos counting?], the easiest route is just to keep more of the same thing going, cause you have enough people that just like what youre doing.
But at that point I guess it was 18 albums that we had done you just say, Whats the point? But if you just push yourself, youre capable of doing bigger, more expansive, more intricate things. We had written at that point almost an albums worth of songs that would have been the Lil Beethoven album, but we just thought, God, boring.
Thatd be boring for us listeners, too. And as Russell points out: What the heck did Sparks have to lose, anyway? Its not like its Mariah Carey, where theyre going to let down the entire EMI organization, or whoever she works for.
Our thing, Russell continues, has always been the whole spirit of pop music: rebellion, and sort of provocation but it can be in nonsloganeering ways, not provocative in an off the establishment kind of way, but just musically, and doing things that people have gotta go, Whoa, what is that?
And if its loads of heavy drums and bass and guitars you think you need to truly rock yourself into bliss, listen to the new albums method of discarding standard instrumentation and shape without losing an ounce of in-yo-face rock belligerence.
Says Russell, We try to figure out ways to replace those things so we can do that with stacked up voices, aggressive strings. Theres other ways it can still have the spirit of rock music at its aggressive best, but also be done in another way.
Indeed, as Ron keenly observes, When we first started out, we were kind of forcing drums and guitars to play songs that werent natural for drums and guitars; but I think as time went on, we got brainwashed in a way to 4/4 structures. So this was a way to free ourselves up in the same way we kinda felt free at the very beginning, where it isnt sort of a natural fit for a band to be doing what were doing. And thats the way we like it, where there is a forced feeing to the arrangement.
And Sparks do all this without much regard to fans expectations. Russell: Thats one thing that we almost try to not play to, the What would the Sparks audience want? When you do that, you get into a trap of saying, Well, this is whats expected, even within Sparks world. Hopefully, Sparks audience is gonna go with us where we go because thats the nature of what we do. Taking risks and doing things in unexpected ways has always been there with Sparks.
Sparks perform Exotic Creatures of the Deep and Kimono My House in their entirety at UCLA Royce Hall on Saturday, February 14.