Kiss Me Quick

Here’s something you may not realize about Sparks. It’s just a little thing that occurred to me. Namely, Russell Mael has rather a sexy voice when he’s not hitting his highest falsetto notes. You probably listen to Propaganda and Kimono My House a lot, and on those records Russ sounds just like a girl. But I went through a phase of listening to Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat a lot, and I noticed that Russell sounds quite dreamy when he’s in the lower ranges of his vocal capacity. Not to mention that I’ve always thought he was cute, so yeah. For that reason, and others, Pulling Rabbits is probably the least silly and most sexy of Sparks albums. The real reason for that, the record’s raison d’être, is the usual Sparks business of producing incredibly spot-on parody of popular musical styles. In this case, New Wave. It’s the first and best Fake New Wave record ever, and a better one than many real New Wave records. The nefarious-mustached Ron Mael easily fabricates the sound; lots of catchy synths, dramatic melodies and just a touch of rock bite. Meanwhile, Russell does the hyper-stylized vocal mannerisms that define New Wave, and he does them so well you almost can’t tell it’s a parody. Until you hear the lyrics, that is. The lyrics are, as usual, completely ridiculous. This one is actually uncharacteristically unsilly. It spoofs the cliches of romanticized ‘let’s fuck’ songs, but only slightly. If you weren’t familiar with Sparks and didn’t know that their mission in life is to make fun of everything around them, you’d think this was a real New Wave song, by the likes of someone like Simple Minds or Modern English, maybe even a long-lost Depeche Mode B-Side or something. So convincing that had they wanted to, Sparks could have surfed the ‘Wave to mainstream popularity. All they needed was louder suits and more flamboyant hair. And dumber lyrics.

 

Here In Heaven

Ok, so Sparks might possibly be an acquired taste. Their records might sound like a weird novelty to the uninitiated. But I challenge you not to be charmed by their appearance. Russell’s clunky chicken dance. Ron’s deadpan glare. Those curls. That mustache. They’re adorable. Plus, they wrote a song about Romeo moping around  heaven, waiting for Juliet, which all kinds of clever and hilarious. Sometimes the world needs reminding that there are so many more things to sing about than drinking and booty. This is your antidote when you’re going crazy from all the mindlessness you’ve been exposed to.

The Ghost of Liberace

I’ll admit I actually find this song a bit grating. But it represents very well late-career Sparks. In which they’ve come to rely on a specific formula. Maybe I’m wrong about their creative process, but it seems like they first come up with the randomest song title they can think of and work from there. Sometimes it’s just Russ chanting the song title/joke over an endlessly repetitive synth melody. Here there’s a full set of lyrics in narrative formation, and they’re pretty damn funny. Love the formula or hate it, those guys have never lost their sense of humor. Sometimes they can be annoying but there’s always a good joke in there somewhere. I do miss early Sparks, when they were a full band with guitars and drums. They must have figured out keeping a stable of supporting players was too much trouble when all they ever needed was Ron’s keyboard and a mic for Russell. Now they’re the world’s only electronic music parody duo. But they’re not parodists in the Weird Al sense. They’re not interested in deflating whatever the next big thing is. They just write whatever they think is amusing. The youngest among you might not understand what makes this song funny. It’s funny because Liberace is such an absurd personality. If you don’t remember, for a few decades starting in the 1940’s he ruled Vegas as a kind of smarmier version of Elton John. That is: flamboyant, sparkly, tacky, and piano-based. Also gay, but unlike Sir Elton, never out with it. I read that he’d force his toy-boys to have plastic surgery so they’d look more like him, something Elton John would never dream of doing, because Elton John is married to someone his own age, for one thing, and also because Elton John isn’t a total freaking lunatic like that. Though that whole story may not even be true, who knows. Anyhow, Liberace was a talented showman and pianist, but his horrible taste in everything you can imagine and slimy Vegas persona has made him into a figure of high hilarity, even without anyone coming along to write a song about him.

Get In The Swing

“I ain’t no Freud, I’m from L.A.” sings Russ Mael whilst flouncing about in tiny shorts. Why Sparks never caught on in America I can’t imagine. Maybe because Americans like their pop stars less flouncy? Then there’s another one where the shorty shorts are different color. Throughout, Russ looks cherubic and fey, Ron looks like an  Springtime For Hitler understudy. And fey. In 1975 the world desperately needed a parody of all those horny glam rock sagas, with a lesson about salmon tossed in. Sparks made their name with glam rock parodies, then went on to parody disco and electronica. With the distinction that everything they did could easily stand on its own, and was in fact frequently much better than whatever it was making fun of in the first place.