Sparks - Exotic Creatures of the Deep

Sparks - Exotic Creatures of the Deep
(Lil Beethoven, 2008)
8 out of 10 (update: see below)

Joke refrains repeated to death by a flamboyant, falsetto-flaunting singer (Russell Mael) with harmony stacks bigger than Freddie Mercury's. Songs based on novelty-style concepts. Unrealistic, programmed synthetic string sections and piano patches (Ron Mael) standing in for the real thing, with occasional silly rock riffing and drums and even a track mostly cribbed from a Kylie Minogue strip-club groove. All from a pair of brothers that's still doggedly making music after roughly 40 years.

I'm serious when I say that the Maels' latest, Exotic Creatures of the Deep, took over my brain for a full work-week. To review this is to shine a spotlight on what Sparks have been doing out of said spotlight (at least in America) for several year now. Lil' Beethoven was the 2002 album that practically reinvented Sparks into what they are now. Every song on that record is an epic meditation on something I would never expect or even hope to meditate on, and yet by the time almost every song cycles past the third minute, I'm ready for the fourth and perhaps beyond. Some choice choruses: "I am the rhythm thief/ Say goodbye to the beat;" "I married myself/ I'm very happy together;" "How do I get to Carnegie hall?/ Practice, man, practice!!"...and from "My Baby's Taking Me Home," simply the titular line, repeated over...and over...

...and over. Good thing that all these crazy, seemingly bad ideas are put to the test by experts in the pop field; they feel revelatory and sound like nothing else (with the possible exception of a couple latter-day Residents tracks, and that's only in some of the arrangements). Hello Young Lovers, from 2006, was surprising mainly for its stubborn continued exploration of the exact same technique, four years later; another surprise, I must say, is how much better it was. (One song consists mostly of recitations of "The Star-Spangled Banner." I am not joking when I say this is kind of fantastic.) Third time being the charm, now there is Exotic Creatures of the Deep to make the best of this stunning approach yet.

The title is apropos, perhaps accidentally, in that these bizarre entities really had to sink in before becoming fully embedded into the skull. "The Director Never Yelled 'Cut'" is one peculiar creature that took a little time to really settle; it is a song about a director whose style of finding a good performance is to let the camera keep rolling until she sees something she likes. Metaphor? Probably not, but Russell's repetition of "the director never yelled 'cut,'" alternating with vastly harmonized "aahhh"s, makes the song into as much of an enigma as the director character's intentions. "Strange Animal" goes on like a "regular" jazzy pop tune until someone joins the song and then begins critiquing the song itself — or is he critiquing a different song we can't hear? Unclear — and the swinging syncopation of the hook, "What a strange animal we are," is set unchanged against a 2/4 rock beat for the remainder of the track.

There are nine other songs, and if you think it seems futile for me to have tried to describe two of them, imagine how I feel. When Sparks started, they were a somewhat more straightforward, bombastic glam-pop outfit; 1974's Kimono My House is a classic of smart silliness, attitude and melodies. Now it's the 2000s and they've almost completely sealed themselves off from any trends. They're completely alone, almost wrongly so — okay, so wrong it's way, way right. If I tried to go into more detail, you'd start to say, "I should hate these songs! Shouldn't I? Isn't this sub-TMBG kiddy nonsense?" Nope. It is not. If you have any inkling to trust me that this works, and that these guys are making the very, very strangest and some of the best pop music around, do listen. If you get the joke, or more appropriately, if you get past the joke (the false grandeur) into the real grandeur (the genius), it's hypnotic. Really. Sparks get gold.

-Spencer Owen

update: I've changed the grade but I'm too lazy to change the content of the review. Days after I published this review, I realized just how good their '06 release, Hello Young Lovers, really was. I'd give that one a 8.5 and this one an 8; I'm continuing to listen to it, and the rest of Sparks' catalogue, and I think it's the best album they've put out that I've yet heard. I've got a handful still to check out, but something tells me Whomp That Sucker isn't gonna vault into the top. I shall see.