The one track on this album that I've never been able to get behind is "Biology 2," but it should be noted that it's by guitarist Earle Mankey, and it doesn't even have Russell on vocals (Earle is responsible for the chipmunk falsetto in this one). It really sounds like a bad parody of every negative stereotype one could associate with the band; it's based around one of the worst clunky guitar riffs I've ever heard from a band I like, and it has high-pitched vocals singing incomprehensible lyrics about reproductive biology on the cellular level. Ok, I'll admit, I allow myself a dumbass smirk at "Oh hold me, you know you are my one and only phenotype, and together we could have a genotype," but I always prefer to skip it, and the album would be noticeably better without it (I'm not sure if it would be a full grade better but I'd have to think about it).

The album's pretty amazing aside from that track, fortunately. Two of the tracks, "Roger" and "Saccharin and the War," were penned by Russell, and my mind tends to file them away as "minor" tracks, but they're still interesting. The lyrics to "Roger" are completely incomprehensible even when I'm reading them (hilariously, in the liner notes of my edition of the album, Ron says he doesn't understand the song), but I'm rather interested by the mix of piano, goofy keyboard sounds, and above all that weird loping riff that could be a guitar or a keyboard but still sounds incredibly bizzare either way. "Saccharin and the War" has its own set of interesting-but-bewildering lyrics, but the main appeal is definitely in the music, which starts off as centered around a warm-sounding set of guitar lines and loud bass before turning into a rousing piano-driven coda over that same loud bass and pounding drums.

The rest of the album features credits for Ron Mael, with a few shared by Russell ("Simple Ballet," "Slowboat," "Big Bands") and one shared by bassist Jim Mankey ("(No More) Mr. Nice Guys"), and it's all great to some degree or another. In the hands of a less eccentric group, the great chorus and harmonies of "Wonder Girl" would likely have been grafted into a more conventional power-pop framework, with the lyrics in the verses swapped out for something else. Instead, the sole guitar lick (props to Mark Prindle for catching that it's the first line to "Happy Trails") pops in and out sporadically, and the music mostly centers around drums jumping from channel to channel, light music-hall piano and multiple Russells singing lines like "She was a wonder to her dad / A self-made man who owned all that he had / And after all, self-made men have daughters who just won't ball." The music of "Fa La Fa Lee" is based around a lost Cars outtake that the brothers Mael found after stealing a time machine, reworked to have some gnarly chord sequences, a guitar part that should be followed by a cry of "Charge!" immediately thereafter, a silly bass solo near the end, and a bunch of other things. Oh, and the lyrics are a lament about not being able to commit incest with one's sister because it's against the law.

Three of the remaining tracks are about music in some way: "High C" is about a former opera singer who has had difficulty adjusting to post-fame life; "Simple Ballet" is about creating a ballet for public consumption; "Big Bands" is about a former big band performer who loves the occasions when he still hears this kind of music. "High C" was Ron's favorite track from the first two albums, and that's a perfectly defensible position, even if I don't entirely share the sentiment. Musically, it's a fascinating mix of alternately menacing and jittery keyboards, pounding drums (where some of the drum breaks sound transplanted from a frantic heavy metal passage), one of the weirdest doo-wop vocal sections imaginable, and a one-second guitar part near the beginning unlike anything I can remember hearing. "Simple Ballet" sounds like a music box tune arranged for a full rock band, and there some guitar harmonics in the track that are absolutely beautiful. "Big Bands" is multi-part and its music has nothing to do with its lyrical content; it starts off based around vaudeville piano with touches of guitar here and there, before the vaudeville piano is replaced by a guitar playing jittery notes while the drums build up in volume, and finally finishing with a proto-New Wave fast part that could be considered obnoxious but sounds fine to me.

Elsewhere, "Fletcher Honorama" sounds like gibberish but isn't really (it's about a bunch of friends of Fletcher's essentially getting together for a wake before his death and hoping that he doesn't die and ruin their party), and the music is haunting in a subdued way that really reminds me a lot, in terms of atmosphere, of Dylan's "Visons of Johanna." Quiet organ giving way into soothing music-hall piano, subtle guitar textures and gentle singing dominate the bulk of the song, until the last minute when "So be sure so be sure that the boy don't die before the moooorn" starts being repeated as an ever-loudening mantra. On the other side of "Simple Ballet" comes "Slowboat," a beautiful piano-dominated anthemic ballad that would have been a huge hit in a just world. Maybe there are some goofy guitar (or keyboard maybe?) noises in the middle, but that shouldn't have been enough to hold back a song with a vocal melody that feels so compact and yet so expansive (these should be contradictory descriptions but somehow they're not), and the guitar solo that dominates the last minute is a perfect capstone. Finally, there's the album closer "(No More) Mr. Nice Guys," which shows the band doing its best to make a heavy rocker with what's essentially a jangle guitar tone. I admit that the incongruity between the implicit heaviness and the relatively wimpy guitar tone sounds a little goofy, and I've come across people who hate this song largely for this reason. That said, I think the noisy guitar solo in the middle is every bit as effective as a more traditionally heavy metal solo would be, and I like how nasty Russell makes his voice in parts (especially whenever he sings "The Nice Guys cannot and the Nice Guys shall not, the Nice Guys will not win / won't suffice"), and I find the song pretty great overall.

While I wouldn't quite call this the band's best (by the slightest margin, I would say that the high points on Kimono move that one beyond this), I would definitely say that anybody who considers themselves a serious rock historian needs to hear this album a couple of times. It's definitely an album that somebody could reasonably dislike were they so inclined (possible complaints: too twee, too nonsensical, "Biology 2" is the worst thing ever written), but even as my fandom of the band has tempered through the years, I've found that this one still holds up really well for me. If you don't like this or Kimono, Sparks is probably not for you.

Much of the rest of the album also shows this strong focus on guitar pop, and overall the songs are ok but not spectacular. After starting with a fun cabaret-style interlude, "Beaver O'Lindy" sees loud fast drums burst on the scene, and the song turns into a decent fast rocker with a chorus that involves yelling the title one letter at a time. "Do Re Mi" (yup, a cover of that song) does the transition from keyboard-based ballad to speedy rave-up rocker much better, and it's easy to see why it was such a stage favorite. "Underground" (written by Earle Mankey) is a pretty catchy pop-rocker (and way more enjoyable than "Biology 2" could ever be), with some interesting twists, but again, it doesn't really betray much in the way of genius. "Whippings and Apologies" (coming immediately out of the great 45-second music-hall piece "Batteries Not Included") is great though, featuring a nice riff and a real frenzy in the guitars at times, with a nice false end before the song rides the groove for another 90 seconds.

The other tracks are more in line with the kind of band depicted on the debut, but these are uneven as well (the best track in this category is definitely the aforementioned "Batteries Not Included"). "Nothing is Sacred" is a bizarre lumbering number with a curious piano riff in the chorus, and for me it just kind of meanders by until the end (there are a couple of small departures from the main song that I find inspiring, though), when Russell's incessant "NOTHING IS SACRED ANY MORE, NO NO NOTHING IS SACRED ANY MORE ..." falsetto scream-sings take over and the song really gets on my nerves. "Here Comes Bob" is another fun music-hall number, bolstered by a small playful string ensemble, about a guy who meets people by running his car into theirs (hitting buses and limos if he wants to meet a lot of people at once), and while my first listens to the song made me wonder why I was wasting my life in such a way, I've come to enjoy it plenty. "Moon Over Kentucky" is another grower, full of dark atmosphere in the piano and guitars, and I find myself especially drawn to (a) the way Russell places the emphasis on the syllables in the chorus, and (b) the organ chordings at the end (the band could have easily chosen to just fade out over the final Russell wailings over the piano/guitar vamp, but I like that they didn't), which provide a very satisfactory conclusion. The rest of the album is a little forgettable, though; "Angus Desire" is a pleasant shuffle that leaves little impression on me, and "The Louvre" is just a decent atmosphere with the lyrics sung once in French and once in English because they couldn't decide which version to include, so they decided to just throw on both.

A lot of people regard this as the equal or even the superior to the debut, but obviously I can't even remotely get behind that; it's just nowhere near as interesting. Maybe it's more refined and more mature in some ways, but this kind of refinement and maturity is totally counter-productive. I should note that my CD version has both this and the debut on the same disc, and I don't know about the availability or cost of stand-alone versions of this, so it may well be that buying both albums together is the best way to go, but as a single disc, I would definitely wait on buying this until I'd heard a few other Sparks albums.

PS: There is a curious mistake in the splitting of the tracks on my version, and I suspect that many who own this album have the same version. The track marked "Batteries Not Included," which actually lasts 45 seconds or so, ends up containing this song plus the bulk of "Whippings and Apologies," and the track marked "Whippings and Apologies" only contains the last 90 seconds after the false ending. Since "Batteries" immediately segues into "Whippings" without a clear division, my solution for mp3 listening was to rip the two tracks together into a single track, which eliminates any annoyances that may come from this.

After the first two albums basically went nowhere commercially, the Halfnelson version of the group dissolved, and the Mael brothers relocated to Britain to record with what basically became a revolving door of supporting musicians. The avant-bubble gum sound of the debut and the jangle pop of Woofer were tossed aside, and in their place the band turned to the slickest, richest, most European and least American-sounding glam pop sound imaginable from the early 70s. Yes, the band mixes up the genres that are grafted into this base sound, and there's a good deal of variety in the sounds one finds from song to song (or within a given song), but make no mistake, the band has gone all in on a pretty specific kind of approach. It's one BIG ANTHEM after BIG ANTHEM, driven by Russell singing ridiculous (in a good way) lyrics set to terrific vocal melodies over rich and varied instrumental parts, and if you're into that sort of thing you could find this album a total blast. That said, I can totally understand how somebody could hate this album; it's slick in a way that has little to do with the origins of rock (white men butchering black men's music), and the fact that it often sounds so much like ABBA (whom I quite like, but I can completely understand why somebody wouldn't) means that it can't help but be a polarizing album. Personally, I love the sound when it's firing on all cylinders, but I do get worn down by it, and the lack of as many clever ideas in the last four tracks definitely doesn't help keep me from wilting near the end.

But holy hell, I love those first six tracks. "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us" is a boring choice for a finalist in the "Best Sparks Song" competition (the choice is boring, not the song), but sometimes things are obvious for a reason. After the gradual fade-in, with Russell singing the first verse over a relatively subdued keyboard part, the song becomes absolutely bonkers and fantastic, with loud guitar riffs, B-Western (the "B" stands for "Best") gunshots, hilariously majestic organ chords, over-the-top guitar wanks, and above all Russell proclaiming bizarre "if we battle I'm going to win" imagery in his own faux-operatic manner. "Amateur Hour" is an up-beat number centered around a guitar line that doubles as the chorus melody, full of variations in tempo and intensity, and with Russell singing an amazing melody about teenagers learning to become good at sex. Best line: "Dance laugh wine dine and talk and sing / But those cannot replace what is the real thing / It's a lot like playing the violin / You cannot start off and be Yehudi Menuhin." "Falling in Love With Myself Again," as you might expect, is a love song for a narcissist, based around a bombastic waltz crossed with what's essentially circus music, and it's impossible for me to not have the chorus echo around in my head afterwards (and fortunately, I'm happy for it to be there).

It's not an easy task to pick out clear favorites out of this group of six tracks, but in giving it some thought, I find myself inclined to pick "This Town ..." and "Here in Heaven." The story behind "Here in Heaven" is great: a Romeo and Juliet pair make a suicide pact, Romeo goes through with it, Juliet backs out, Romeo is kinda sad and kinda pissed off about his situation. In terms of music, the song has long been a favorite of mine for singing in the shower, especially for the fun contrast between the tense descending melody in the verses and the chorus in an appropriate higher register ("Up here in heaven without you/Up here in heaven without you/Up here in heaven without you/It is hell knowing that your health will keep you out of here for many many years), and I've always especially admired the uneven intensity of the instrumentation under the chorus. Best line: "Juliet, I thought we had agreed/Now I know why you let me take the lead."

Up next is a track that I find myself overlooking if I'm not careful, but which is just about as great as the others. "Thank God It's Not Christmas" is a song about how fun life is for somebody on every day except for Christmas, when he has to spend the day with his wife, and the metamorphosis from the loud guitar part that starts the song, to the quieter parts of the verses, to the re-emergence of intensity at the end of each verse, and finally into the enormous chorus, is one of the best parts of an album that's full of great parts. And finally, rounding out this stretch, is "Hasta Manana Monsieur," which basically sounds exactly like ABBA from a couple of years later, except with a slightly heavier bottom. The lyrics are way more hilarious than anything you'll find on an ABBA album, though; they concern a doofus foreign exchange student who fell in love with his host but isn't even sure what language she speaks, so he tries a gibberish mix of whatever terms he can pick up. The best line of the album: "You mentioned Kant and I was shocked, so shocked/You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues." Musically, well, I tend to like ABBA, so I like the song, and if you don't like ABBA, you'll probably hate it.

So the first six tracks are amazing, and the album seems well on its way to wedging its way into my top 50 ... but then it kinda loses me. Out of "Talent is an Asset," "Complaints" and "In My Family," I'd say that "Complaints" comes closest to being a great track, thanks to the contrast between the lilting verses and the up-tempo chorus (the middle-eight is a lot of fun too), but it still doesn't quite get to that level for me, and both "Talent" and "Family" (which tend to get mixed together in my head in such a way that I can't always remember which parts belong to which song) strike me as sounding like the album's style was left out in the sun a little too long. The closing "Equator" makes a stab at doing something significantly different, as it's a relatively slow, moody song about a guy realizing that he has no shot of finding the girl he's waiting for (after she told him she'd meet him at the equator, which should have been a clue right there that things just weren't looking his way), but the song just irritates me to no end. Well, not so much the song on the whole as any time that Russell sings the word "Equator," or, as he sings in the chorus (in a layer of echoey falsetto), "Eee-quay-tah, Eee- quay-tah" over and over. It also doesn't help that the song's coda is in much the same vein as the one to "Nothing is Sacred," with Russell singing the word "Equator" a capella and ad nauseum (with occasional interjections of "She said she'd be right there!") over the chorus. What a horrible ending to a mostly great album.

What irritates me most about the drop-off at the end of the album is that the band had some great material in reserve that could have been used instead. The version I have (on a two-fer with Big Beat) contains a pair of fantastic B-sides that would definitely have improved the album with their inclusion. "Barbecutie" is yet more bombastic glam-pop (about a man who's about to be had for dinner), this time put into rocker form and centered around a ripper of a bass riff, and "Lost and Found" is majestic pop (about somebody who finds a lost wallet and feels no remorse for having a good time with it), heavy on guitar and keyboards, which paves the way for the better material on the following Propaganda. Maybe a proper album with these would get a higher grade, maybe it wouldn't, but just as with a hypothetical Sparks without "Biology 2," I'd have to think about it.

So ok, it's not perfect, but it's still great for the most part, and everybody should hear it at least once. For what it's worth, this album clearly had a major influence on Queen, and I don't like Queen much at all, and I still really like (almost love) this album, so anybody who likes Queen should definitely be all over this.

As mentioned, the album has an annoying stretch near the end, though it recovers strongly with the closing "Bon Voyage," which sets lyrics that seem to be about people waving goodbye to Noah's ark to music that alternates between anthemic bombast in the chorus and a whole lot of variation in the verses. "Achoo" is a decent enough bouncy number (which appears to be about dealing with your girl leaving you for a doctor) that features Russell fake-sneezing as a hook from time to time, but the band just couldn't leave well enough alone, and the song ends with a seemingly endless series of "Achoo" sounds piled on top of each other that just irritate the hell out of me. "Who Don't Like Kids" is more than a little dubious lyrically, but I could forgive the song (because, really, this is yet another song where I can't make out what the hell Russell is singing unless I look up the lyrics) and its excessive giddiness if it weren't for the occasional interlude of a bunch of kids singing the chorus in a way that drives me up a wall. I normally try to avoid "annoying" as a primary reason to dislike a song or two, but these two push the boundaries in such a way that I have to make an exception.

Thank goodness for the first eight tracks. The opening title track is a 25-second snippet of a capella circus music (Russell harmonizes with several layers of himself in a fascinating way), and it's immediately followed by "At Home, At Work, At Play," which is almost certainly my favorite Sparks song. It definitely sounds somewhat like a Kimono retread, but I'm ok with that; there's not a thing in this three-minute slab of bombastic keyboard-heavy glam rock that I would change. The lyrics are about a guy who is jealous of the time that his girl spends with other people despite the fact that she spends pretty much all of her time with him in some capacity, and it has some of the most hilariously elaborate lyrics about lust ever written crossed with elaborate laments about how there just isn't enough time to spend with her (even though, again, she's with him all of the time). It's the best combination of clever lyric and interesting/catchy music that I've ever heard from Sparks, and it's a track that I haven't grown tired of in the least despite the fact that it's certainly the Sparks track that I've listened to most over the years. If you've never heard this song or read the lyrics to it, do both right now.

The rest can't live up to such a great start, but it gives a noble effort. "Reinforcements" (a music-hall number with a martial rhythm in the chorus) and "B.C." (a silly number about a man named Aaron who doesn't want his wife, Betty, to leave him and take their son, Charlie, because it would ruin the greatness of having a family that can be called "ABC") are relatively trite by the standards of the band's best work, but they're cute, so they can stick around. Much better is the following "Thanks But No Thanks," a Kimono-worthy number about a kid who has to keep turning down the advances of sexual predators as he goes home ("...my orders come from high above me ..."), since his parents have ordered him to ("...about a foot or two above me ...") even though he feels bad about hurting their feelings, all set to a memorable tune that climaxes with a guitar solo that sounds an awful lot like an electric violin to me but apparently isn't. "Don't Leave Me Alone With Her" takes the "spending time with my wife is annoying because she's boring and the world isn't" concept of "Thank God it's Not Christmas" and amplifies it into "my wife is f$%*($&ing terrifying," set to a stomping ominous tune that makes it a minor classic. On the other side, "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth" takes misogyny in a new direction, combining a relatively gentle harpsichord-based number (except for the weird breakdown in the middle) with lyrics that allude to the horrible things that Mother Earth can do when angry (with the implication that you shouldn't cheat on her), and while I'm a little surprised that this would have gotten the nod over "Home/Work/Play" to be a single, I'm not surprised it did pretty well in that regard. And finally, "Something for the Girl with Everything" is a cheery number whose tune masks lyrics that convey the sheer terror that comes from trying to find a gift for somebody who is blackmailing you, and seeking things that will make her happy and also not want to talk ("Three wise men are here/bearing gifts to aid amnesia").

There were also a couple of B-sides from the era, and they're decent enough, though not as great as their Kimono counterparts. "Alabamy Right" is yet another bit of music-hall influenced pop, this time apparently about dealing with the late-day rush as a supermarket cashier, and "Marry Me" is the one time that the misogyny gives way to reveal somebody who actually wants a happy quiet life with somebody (key stanza: "A happily-ever-after does that seem too much to ask?/With trees and tots and stucco walls and fountains in the back/And lawns that you or I can mow and neighbours who will chat/About important issues and the state of this 'n that") despite all of the pretense elsewhere in the band's material.

While this album certainly has its downsides, it also has so many great aspects that, for anybody who likes bombastic 70s pop, it's practically essential. If you've bought Sparks and Kimono already and like them, this should be your next stop. It's probably for the best that they didn't try to make another album in this vein, though.

It doesn't help that, like its predecessors, it has some ideas that I continue to find more than a bit obnoxious. Holy hell does the Russell-penned "Pineapple" annoy me; it's another excursion into the world of music hall, which had tended to work out well for the band in the past, but the way Russell sings the title as he alternates with lyrics that extol the virtues of the fruit is another one of those Sparks ideas that I wish had stayed unrecorded. "How Are You Getting Home" starts off with 15 seconds that are absolutely on par with the more inspired moments of the last couple of albums, and the song is nice whenever some variation of that initial snippet returns, but I could live without any of the bits based around Russell singing the title like a spazz. "In the Future" taps into the kind of "Jetsons Glam" approach that Roxy Music dabbled with in their first two albums, and I somewhat like the incongruous splicing of Baroque-style organ passages into the song, but the track is just a mess (and its most memorable parts, the falsetto "Future! Future" and "Innnnn theeee future!!" Russell backing vocals, are also its most obnoxious).

Most of the rest of the album is pretty interesting, though, once you can get beyond things like the general lack of punch in the sound (especially in Russell's vocals). The opening "Hospitality on Parade" might well be the weakest of the remaining tracks, but I've decided that that's because it sounds like a Propaganda track ripped from the supporting features that made Propaganda tracks so interesting. If it had stronger production and was a little faster the various ideas would probably sound better to me.

The other eight tracks roughly divide half into "cute novelty genre exercises" and "full-fledged interesting songs," and I like all of the tracks in both groups (unfortunately, all but one of the novelty exercises is on the first half, and all of the full-fledged interesting tracks are on the second half). "Without Using Hands" is a piano-based music hall ditty about people in Paris doing various things (you guessed it) without using their hands, culminating in a hotel manager getting his hands blown off in an explosion. "Get in the Swing" is basically big-band parade music with a simple chorus and hilariously unfocused lyrics (the one that rambles about salmon and ties it back into something romantic is a crackup). "Under the Table with Her" is chamber music (mostly based around strings but with a recorder in one spot) that appears to be about eating dinner with the dog because people treat the dog well, and "Looks, Looks, Looks" is dead-on swing-era jazz about how, when it comes to attracting women, your other features don't matter if you don't have good looks. I admit that none of these would come immediately to mind if I was asked to put together a list of my favorite 25 or so Sparks tracks (though "Looks, Looks, Looks" might come close), but they're enjoyable when on.

Among the "full-fledged" songs (I don't mean to imply that the others aren't fully formed, but I don't know how to better describe these songs in relation to the genre exercises), the best (not just of this set but of the whole album as well) and most notorious is definitely "Tits." Lyrically, the song depicts a man drunkenly ranting about his marital problems to a bartender (momentarily accusing Harry of maybe being the one breaking up his home, before feeling sorry for it and apologizing), centered around the fact that his wife is now primarily using her breasts for feeding his son Joe, as opposed to other things. Musically, it's really fascinating, full of changes in mood from lilting to bombastic angst, all centered around the great Russell delivery of the lines "So drink Harry, drink Harry, drink 'til you can't drink no more of anything/No more of anything/Drink Harry, drink 'til you can drink no more." Yup, if there's a major reason to listen to Indiscreet, it's definitely "Tits."

As with "Tits," the other three tracks combine interesting music with fascinating glimpses into Ron Mael's musings on relationships between men, women and society at large. "It Ain't 1918" is fiddle-based music about a happy couple who got married after World War I and decided to keep everything about themselves the same way as it was when they met, upsetting neighbors and friends who think they're weird and that they shouldn't be allowed to be happy in the way they want to be happy. "The Lady is Lingering" is a more "traditional" Sparks number based around piano and guitar, this time filled with astonished musings upon realizing that the girl he's on a date with hasn't yet offered any of the standard excuses for needing to go home, and it's full of danger and tension to match the uncertainty of the situation. And finally, "Miss the Start, Miss the End" starts as a rant against people who arrive late for and leave early from shows, only to acknowledge that they're finding joy in life from something other than the event they're consuming, and it has quite a happy chorus to contrast with the melancholy verses.

This is an album that I want to like more than I do, based on the individual tracks within it, but I've always found this a surprisingly hard album to want to listen to. The fact that so many of the genre exercise tracks (which are fun, but don't really rise beyond the level of "cute") are crammed into the first half (where they are easily the best part of that half), with the meatier material crammed into the second (unfortunately sharing space with "Pineapple" and "In the Future"), makes it so that I've pretty much checked out by the time the best stuff comes around. A significantly reordered version of the album (even without removing the tracks I really dislike), with at least one track between each of the genre exercise tracks (as opposed to lining them up in a row), and at least one track between each of "Tits," "It's Ain't 1918" and "The Lady is Lingering," would probably merit consideration of a higher grade from me. As is, I'm content to listen to individual tracks from this from time to time, but I can't imagine feeling in the mood for 70s Sparks and picking this over Kimono or Propaganda (or, for that matter, Introducing Sparks). Lots of fans tend to love this, though.

Fortunately, while the instrumentation is pretty bland and monotonous (excepting the final track), the album is still full of fascinating lyrics and strong hooks, so it's a nice listen regardless. For me, there are four tracks that are clearly top-notch, and the other seven tracks are all somewhere in the "good" range (except for "Confusion," which I find a bit of a throwaway, even if nothing about it is clearly bad). "I Bought Mississippi River," as mentioned, mingles vaudeville piano with the weird standard mix of the album, with Russell singing an awesome vocal melody set to lyrics about somebody who bought that river and now has to figure out what the hell to do with it. "Everybody's Stupid" is pure juvenile bile in the lyrics (but all the better for it; all of the verses are glorious) set to music heavily inspired by 50s rock and doo-wop, and high-pitched "Everybody's Stupid!!!" backing vocals over the extended coda never stop being funny (if, like me, you're secretly still 14 years old inside).

The other two great tracks bookend the second side and are amazing expressions of Russell/Ron's cynical attitudes towards women. "Throw Her Away (and Get a New One)" is everything I wish the bulk of the album could be, a magnificent speedy Cheap Trick-ish power pop number about the virtues of chasing younger women once your current flame has gotten a little out-of-date. It's a horrible sentiment, but it's a horrible sentiment expressed in the most memorable manner imaginable, and I can't resist singing along to the "Throw her away!!" backing vocals near the end if I'm alone. The final track of the album, "I Like Girls," had been part of the band's live repertoire since before Kimono, but hadn't received a satisfactory studio recording, and the arrangement (based around an awesome rising horn riff over a martial rhythm in the background, alternating with something more standard to the rest of the album) clearly betrays its earlier origins. The first verse sums up the tone of the song: "No one is restricted, no one is tied down/But the Greece of old collapsed 'cause/no one liked their girls/We won't have that problem, I'm doing my part/No one asked me but I'll still answer."

The rest of the album is mostly good, but the presentation is such that it rarely has a chance to rise far above it. The best of the lot is probably "Nothing to Do," which would have sounded magnificent if The Ramones had ever gotten around to covering it like Johnny Ramone wanted (the other band members declined), but still sounds good even with the guitars so muted. The opening "Big Boy" at least gives some clear justification to the beat-heavy mix (it's about a giant walking into town and wreaking havoc, though I'm not sure if it's about an actual giant or somebody with a giant penis), and the remaining two tracks on side one ("I Want to Be Like Everybody Else" and "Fill-er-up") are fun exercises in combining Chuck Berry licks with over-the-top spastic presentation of said licks (and, in the case of the latter, great lyrics about gorging on "fuel" with no consideration at all for the consequences). On side two, "Confusion" (as mentioned) doesn't do much for me, but the other two can't help but leave a pretty strong impression. In "Screwed Up," I'm still not actually sure how it is that anybody in the song is actually screwed up (as the chorus asserts), but the first verse is a real hoot, and the song feels like something resembling a real statement about the world at large more than most Sparks songs do, and I've always liked the tune, so I enjoy it a lot. Finally, "White Women" is about as racist, sexist and non-PC as Sparks can possibly be, but the drum heavy arrangement (with minimal guitar) really works with the song, and it's hard to imagine another context where hearing someone bellowing "AS LONG AS THEY'RE WHITE! AS LONG AS THEY'RE WHITE! As long as they're white from head to toe ..." would be so enjoyable.

All in all, this is a good album, but it really strikes me as a bit of a wasted opportunity, and it doesn't quite crack the top tier of Sparks albums for me. Still, there's a good chunk of great material, and this is the first album from the band to not have any tracks that I find intolerably obnoxious, and thus I'd have to recommend this to anybody who thinks they might be a Sparks fan. Just don't go into it with excessive expectations and you'll be fine.

Well, I'm probably a dolt, and because of this I like pretty much every song on here (I guess I'm not really that thrilled with with "I'm Not" or "Girls on the Brain" but I still find them interesting). I don't think I love any of them, but underneath the sheen of slick session work there are fun and memorable melodies, odd topics in the lyrics, and fascinating mishmashes of styles (in other words, the staples of Sparks at their best). One odd feature that makes a repeated appearance is a sudden interest in taking on (superficial) aspects of the Beach Boys in the vocals; "A Big Surprise," "Ladies" and especially "Over the Summer" sound unnervingly like the cliched version of the band that the Beach Boys were in the process of becoming (which wouldn't reach full flight until later), and while it's a little weird that Ron and Russell would want to start aping them in 1977, when the Beach Boys were no longer remotely cool, it's a fun additional detail. "A Big Surprise" also immediately shows that Ron's keyboards are going to be an important part of the band's sound again, and the mix of these fun lyrics (best lines: "Somebody told me how the motion picture would end/I turned and glared at them/And then I read the way the world was going to end/With a whimpering sound, not a banging away/I'm sorry I gave it away") with that stupendous vocal melody (the twist in the chorus is also glorious) is enough to put me in a great mood right away. "Ladies" is a tribute to all of the various ladies in Ron's life, such as Dinah Shore, Sara Lee and Betty Crocker, and while there's nothing remotely serious about the song, I find it to be a crack-up. And "Over the Summer," which milks the Beach Boys harmony style best of all, is a reminiscience of those great times in high school when you'd come back from summer vacation and find that lots of girls had managed to blossom since you'd last seen them, and the song feels like, with a little bit of tweaking, it could have fit into one of the early Beach Boys albums just fine.

On side one, the best of the three unmentioned tracks is "Occupation," a speedy rocker (with an odd keyboard sound fading in and out) that gives Russell a chance to sing Ron's 4-line musings about a whole bunch of different professions. Sample lyrics: "We pilots take you anywhere/We'll be your father in the air/We'll try to look calm and cool/But we're as scared as all of you." "I'm Not" is an oddly constructed combination of a lumbering rhythm section (the Big Beat mix would be VERY beneficial here, but alas the drums aren't as loud as they should be) and lighter harmonies, and it's kind of a mess, but it's a mess I never find myself skipping over. "Forever Young," which closes out the side, isn't quite on the level of the Dylan song it's clearly referencing, but it's fun to have a return to some of the glam aspects (in the guitars) of the '74 albums, and the voice-of-God proclamations from Russell right before the last verse help make this into a great pisstake on generic 70s anthems.

On side two, aside from "Over the Summer" and "Girls on the Brain" (Sparks doing a bluesy number about the way you could expect Sparks to, with lyrics that are about what you would expect from a Sparks song with that title), there are a couple of really nice numbers in "Goofing Off" and "Those Mysteries." "Goofing Off" is a song about taking full advantage of the weekend, set to a nagging melody that's ambiguously ethnic (mostly Jewish in the tune but with a pseudo-Greek rhythm) and chock-full of the kinds of silly hooks that I'm always a sucker for. And finally, "Those Mysteries" is a surprisingly tender and nostalgic glimpse at the life of a young kid who has questions about everything in the universe (and certainly more than their dad would want to answer), and just like with "Miss the Start, Miss the End," it shows that Sparks could balance the silly and snide with the emotionally earnest just fine if they wanted to. The music is very conventional, but it's lovely nonetheless, and Russell's vocal delivery is just swell.

This isn't a remotely important album by any means, and the legacy of Sparks wouldn't suffer at all if the band had somehow jumped directly from Big Beat to No. 1 in Heaven without recording this in between, but it deserves a better reputation than it's had since its release. Making another album like this probably would have been a really bad idea, though, and I'm glad they went for something so different with the next album.

This turned out to be a pretty nice fit for the band, all things considered. After all, as many instances as there might have been of enjoyable guitar work on Sparks albums to this point, Sparks was ultimately a band built around keyboards, snide lyrics and great vocal melodies, and this album puts those aspects front and center. Yes, a couple more distinct ideas per track would have been nice, and there are definitely lengthy stretches where I feel like the brothers somewhat disappear behind the wall of Moroder slickness, but these are flaws that I only notice after the fact, when I feel like I've listened to an album that's a good deal shorter than it actually is (and this is a pretty short album as is). While I don't agree with the band's assessment of this as their best album (or so I've read), I can understand why they'd feel that way.

The opening "Tryouts for the Human Race" sets the album's feel in place immediately, making a song about sperm racing to be the one that unites with the egg into what's probably the most epic six minutes the band had put together yet. Everything about the song feels hot and sticky and moist, from the "dripping" synth sound that starts things off to the swirling sounds in the background to the various synth lines to the pounding beat to the vocal lines. And oh man, the idea of people dancing to lyrics like "We just want to feel the sun and be your little daughter or your son/We're just words that lovers use, words that light that automatic fuse/When that love explosion comes, my, oh my, we want to be someone" just fills me with all sorts of glee. Up next is "Academy Winning Performance," credited solely to Ron, and if it's weaker it's not by much. The thick production lets up a little bit, which is good and bad, but Russell's delivery of a put-down against a woman who's an expert at playiing different roles to ensare men is venomous enough to offset whatever drop in atmosphere there might be.

Far more venomous, though, is the following "La Dolce Vita," a decadent, lush, driving put-down of gold-digging women ("Mira, mira, guys, there's Lira in her eyes" is a typical line), full of alternation between lengthy synth solos and hellish sequenced passages over the best dancable rhythm of the album. Man, is "I catch a cold just by looking in your eyes" a great put-down. Flipping over to side 2, we come to "Beat the Clock" (without a Moroder credit), a 100% disco track musically and a 100% crackup lyrically. The chorus: "I've seen everything there is/I've done everything there is/I've met everyone but Liz/Now I've even met ol' Liz/No time for relationship/Skip the foreplay, let 'er rip/You gotta beat the clock, beat the clock/Beat the clock, beat the clock."

Up next is "My Other Voice," and while I tended to consider it lesser for a long time due to the fact that Moroder is clearly the most prominent figure in the track (he's listed first for a reason), I have to give beautiful atmosphere its due, no matter how it's produced. The first half of the track is instrumental and at first seems like it would better fit into the middle of a contemporary soundtrack than this album, but then a synth (apparently not a guitar like I thought initially) comes in and plays a rather lovely interlude over the atmospheric background, and then a vocoder pops in as a prelude to the vocal portion of the song. Russell then sings a verse of a really lovely vocal melody (with a great delivery too; the way he sings the "oooooy" of the line "With my other voice I can destroy this room" is heavenly), and then a vocoder sings the same melody with different lyrics, and overall the song makes a fine journey from confusing to uplifting in its five minutes.

Finally, there's "The Number One Song in Heaven," which consolidates all of the production effects and keyboard approaches of the rest of the album, and uses them to flesh out a 7-minute "epic" (by Sparks standards anyway) in two parts. The first half is slow and atmospheric in a way that's similar to "My Other Voice," and then the song suddenly turns into an up-tempo techno/disco number with Russell bellowing, "It's number one all over heaven/It's number one all over heaven/It's number one all over heaven/THE NUMBER ONE SONG IN ALL OF HEAVEN!" to herald the second half. The second half is full of all sorts of curiousities, from the current sequencing of sounds after the "...Gabriel plays it, let's hear him play it" verse to the lyrical twist of the song breaking out of heaven and becoming the biggest hit among the living. Wishful thinking, I suppose, but it's a great way to end the song.

No, this isn't quite the best Sparks album, but it is a great reinvention of the band that allowed them to re-emphasize some of their strengths without dwelling in the past, and I'd definitely recommend it to anybody. It also has to hold the title of "Sparks album most likely to be enjoyed by somebody who otherwise hates Sparks," based on the heavy presence of Moroder and the way that it can work as a dance-pop album and not just a collection of weird post-modern pop music (to varying degrees of weirdness). It's also the last really good Sparks album for a long time, sadly.

The album does open and end on fairly high notes. "When I'm With You" (a minor hit in France, because why not) takes a very Mael approach to expressing that he becomes a better person when he's with the person he's writing about (sample lyric: "I never feel like garbage when I'm with you/I almost feel normal when I'm with you"), and it has lots of little interesting bits, like the repeated "with you"'s at the end of each verse or the various synth lines that come in and out over the simple beat. There's nothing resembling the power of the typical material from Heaven, but it's still rather nice. The closing "The Greatest Show on Earth" is also pretty interesting; I get the feeling that the most striking part (the nagging "Steady as she goes/She's the greatest show") came from Moroder or Faltermeyer and not the Maels, but the other sung parts feel like they probably came Sparks themselves, and they stand out well from the instrumentation (which isn't terrible but definitely sounds like a compromise between the two main parties).

But the rest? There are some interesting lyrics here and there ("Rock and Roll People in a Disco World" is an amusing stab against rock dinosaurs grabbing onto the world of disco in an attempt to stay relevant, and the lyrics to "Young Girls" and "Noisy Boys" are horrifying enough in tandem to be noteworthy), but much of this album consists of music that I'd never consider listening to in another context. "Just Because You Love Me" doesn't even have interesting lyrics to go with its pedestrian everything, and while "Rock and Roll People ..." has strong lyrics, I just feel gross listening to it. "Young Girls" sounds in spots like a Kimono-era track trying to break out of a disco cocoon, but that's not enough to offset the other major aspects of the song (at least "I Like Girls" was a rollicking good time). "Noisy Boys" does have a rousing happy chorus after the pseudo-tense verses, and I do find myself attracted to a couple of the keyboard parts in the verses, but it stands out as much because of all that came before it as because of its own merits. As for "Stereo," it has its one-word chorus and a bunch of fairly pointless guitar chords (I forgot to mention that there's plenty of relatively simplistic guitar on this album, but nobody is credited for it; I'm assuming it's from Faltermeyer until otherwise informed), and nothing else.

There's also an instrumental version of "When I'm With You" that closes out side one, but it's pretty pointless given that the vocals were the best part. Overall, then, this is a massive disappointment. I knew that Ron Mael had said that he considered this one of the band's weakest albums, but when I bought this I hoped that the step down from Heaven would be a relatively mild one. There are some good tracks (I'd say that "When I'm With You," "Noisy Boys" and "The Greatest Show On Earth" are definite keepers), but a Sparks album should offer so much more than this does. Unless you're a fanatic, don't bother.

Mind you, I still like most of the songs, novelty synth pop or not. "Tips for Teens" has a Propaganda-lite feel to it courtesy of the thick layerings of Russell falsetto and the big chorus, and the lyrics, which seem to center around a really old and senile woman trying to give advice to a teenage girl, are a crack-up. "Funny Face" is an interesting tale of a man who is famous for his good looks but doesn't like the fact that people assume he's a dullard, and who finally achieves happiness after he jumps off a bridge and mangles his face up (so that people will finally start paying attention to him and not his looks). So far so good.

After this point, there are a lot of decent lyrics, and a lot of moments of pleasant enjoyment, but not a lot of tracks where it feels like something very interesting is happening. "Where's My Girl" starts off in a way that makes me want to immediately skip ahead to the next track, but it ends up tapping into the same Propaganda-lite vein that benefitted "Tips for Teens," so I end up enjoying it quite a bit. The closing "Wacky Women" is noisy and spastic in a way that makes it completely bonkers (by the standards of the album), and it's a standout. Beyond that, though, I'm left with tracks like "Don't Shoot Me," where I'm amused by the lyrics (the song starts from the perspectives of soon-to-be-shot rhinos and hippos, then turns to the rhino and hippo hunter, who comes home and shoots somebody who's in the house with his wife) but not especially interested in the music, and other tracks, where I could take or leave the lyrics. There's nothing especially wrong with "Upstairs," "I Married a Martian," (where Russell sometimes sings the chorus in a way that's oddly reminiscient of a contemporary Mick Jagger falsetto), "The Willys" (a bit of a 50s throwback) or "Suzie Safety," but they don't make a strong impact on me either.

Still, bands have had far worse transitions into the 80s, and at worst this album is a pleasant throwaway. The band is clearly comfortable in this new approach (maybe a little too comfortable; the philosophy expressed in "Suzie Safety" could be said to permeate through the whole album), and if they don't stretch themselves much then they don't really fail either. Get it if you're curious.

As with the previous album, though, the fact that I don't really love any of the songs and have reservations about the album as a whole doesn't mean that I don't get some enjoyment out of the various tracks. Some of them kinda stink, of course; the title track (about diarrhea and unwanted erections in inappropriate situations) features nothing especially interesting on top of the beat; "Instant Weight Loss" (about a guy who loses weight after a girl calls him "Fats" but then gains it all back) isn't interesting beyond a quiet recurring synth line; "Tarzan and Jane" lasts three minutes but feels twice as long thanks to some obnoxious ideas (such as the "oo-wee-oo-wee-oo-wee-oo-wee-oo" bit). I more or less like the rest, though. "I Predict" should annoy the crap out of me, but somehow it doesn't; it's very open about the fact that it isn't really based around melody (it's loudly chanted lyrics over a pounding 80s beat), and the lyrics, full of all sorts of predictions of dubious quality, somehow work perfectly in the context of the song. Plus, it may be a cheap gag, but repeatedly singing "And this song will fade out/and this song will fade out ..." and then not fading out the song makes me smirk every time, so I'm ok with the song.

There are a couple of faux-serious anthemic songs in the middle, and they're definitely the best songs on the album. "Sherlock Holmes" is a throwback to early 70s glam-rock anthems (especially from T. Rex; it should be noted that Mack had worked with T. Rex a few years earlier, so this isn't a shocking development) seems to be about somebody trying to woo a girl with a serious Sherlock Holmes fetish, culminating in a frustrated nonsensical plea of "I can dance like Sherlock Holmes/I can sing like Sherlock Holmes/But can't be Sherlock Holmes." "Nicotina" is a big huge bombastic ode (featuring all of the most overblown drum, keyboard and guitar sounds the band can muster) to a poor cigarette, whose fate was bound to the same path (an agonizing death at the moment of being smoked) as so many of her kin before and after have trod. It's completely ludicrous, but it's a track I don't mind coming back to repeatedly, and that doesn't happen a tremendous amount in the 80s with Sparks.

The other five tracks are solidly in the "novelty" category, and they're mostly ok. "Eaten By the Monster of Love" sounds a tremendous amount like contemporary Queen (not a surprise given the producer), and the "Don't let it get me/Don't let it get me" chorus is kind of a crackup (the verses are fun as well). "Sextown USA" (which pretty much has the exact lyrics you'd expect from an early 80s Sparks song with this title), "Mickey Mouse" (which is sung from the perspective of the title character) and "Moustache" (which has great lyrics; Ron writes of the glories and downsides of having a moustache and addresses the issue of his various choices of moustache style) are all up-tempo and moderately memorable, but the pattern of "fast song over pounding beat with robot synths dumped in occasionally" wears me out after a while. As for "The Decline and Fall of Me," I somewhat enjoy the song, but the lyrics make it such a blatant novelty exercise that my enjoyment is significantly tempered.

Essentially, my impression of this album (especially in conjunction with the previous album) is that the band has become a bit of a second-rate self-parody at this point. Mind you, the prime version of the band was good enough that it could absorb such a downgrade and still make music that's worth hearing, but it's a downgrade all the same. Still, while I wouldn't offer a strong recommendation for the album, I wouldn't offer a strong recommendation against it either. After all, it does have a couple of minor classics, and the rest of the album is acceptable background if you're in the mood for the kind of approach the band chooses to take here.

Of course, making such a hard turn away from the novelty route had its drawbacks, as well. As mentioned previously, the band's best 70s work showed the band working within an area of ambiguity regarding the question of whether they were a novelty band or not; the ability to sing such ridiculous lyrics and flash such ridiculous ideas while delivering them in such a dry way that you didn't necessarily realize on first pass just how ridiculous they were was one of their most important talents. Whomp and Angst had spoiled the balance by simplifying the music (especially in the rhythm section) while overly accentuating how silly some of the lyrical ideas were. Space, on the other hand, makes the music less gimmicky but also makes it less fun, and this could be considered to spoil the balance just as much as those albums did. At least on Heaven, despite all of the disco-pop trimmings, it often seemed like Ron was trolling the intended audience with the lyrics, whereas the lyrics on this album are at best moderately clever but never intricate or subversive in the way they'd been on much of that album (or in previous albums). The point of all of this is that, while the band's stylistic tradeoff was a net positive in the short term, it didn't really fix the fundamental problems of the band at this point, and it's not shocking that things started to go so wrong on the next album.

Still, the future is the future, and the present is the present, and the present is pretty good. The big hit of the album was the opening "Cool Places," an up-tempo duet with Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go's, and while I felt a little uncomfortable at first about how normal it sounded, I soon got over it. The vocal melody and instrumental parts (pretty much consisting only of keyboards and drums) are very crisp, for lack of a better term, and the lyrics are a great example of the band's new desire to write clever lyrics without beating the listener over the head with how clever they are. Sample lyric: "I wanna go where nobody's a fool/And no one says, "Uh, hey girl, need a light?" The following "Popularity" didn't have the benefit of having a guest appearance from a relatively famous person, but it's built around the same general approach and isn't much worse. The lyrics look really stupid on the surface, but it seems like their intent is to expose the vapidity of seeking for popularity for its own sake, much the same way that "Cool Places" goes after seeking coolness for its own sake. "What a night, we all drive into town/Where we'll park our cars, and meet the rest of our friends/At a place that's called, I forget what it's called/But it's really great, and all our friends will be there."

Amongst the remaining eight tracks, a couple are relatively gentle and earnest, while the others tend to have energy and/or snark fueling them to some degree. The lyrics to "Please, Baby, Please" are banal beyond saving, but there's a beauty in the interaction of the vocal melody with the nagging synth chords that makes the song worth it. "Lucky Me, Lucky You" (another duet with Jane Wiedlin) passed me by the first few times I listened to the album, but I've come around to it, largely because of the interesting topic (about two people finding love because they crashed on an island together, and mulling over what will happen if they're rescued), but also because it's novel to hear something so oddly touching on a Sparks album.

Among the remaining tracks, the only one to be fueled primarily by energy is "Praying for a Party," which I end up liking for a lot of the same reasons that I like "I Predict" from Angst. It has a monotonous pounding beat, yes, but I like the alternation between the layered Russells, the solo Russell and the humming Russell, so it can stick around on my iPod. The track that is fueled primarily by snark is the closing "Dance Godammit," a slow robotic number in which Russell, in a completely emotionless way, tells his feet and body to dance. If ever a song could make dancing sound like a joyless exercise akin to feeding yourself cauliflower, this is the one. "I get scared when I'm alone/So I don't stay alone/I like clubs/I like girls/I like music/And that's it/Dance Godammit/Dance Godammit."

The other four are all, to varying degrees, fueled by both energy and snark. "All You Ever Think About is Sex" treats sex in the same way "Dance Godammit" treats dance, as a joyless compulsion that's endlessly consumed but never to the point of fulfilment. It's not the most inventive music ever written, but the steady music (aside from a slower introduction) works perfectly with the lyrics. "Rockin' Girls" is synth-based (with quiet guitar once the song picks up steam) faux-rockabilly with moderately clever lyrics: the oft-quoted "And you're the only girl I've ever met who hates 'Hey Jude'/Maybe that's the reason I'm so in love you" is a gem, but the rest is decent as well. "I Wish I Looked A Little Better" is driven forward by the album's best synth part, and the lyrics, about looking irredeemably terrible, are a hoot. And finally, "A Fun Bunch of Guys From Outer Space" (which says the band is "here to infiltrate and get a tan") is a little more silly lyrically than is the norm for this album, but it ends up fitting for largely that reason, and it helps explain why the album cover features Ron covered in a cream pie.

No, this isn't a great album, and truth be told it isn't even that much better than Whomp or Angst. It is, however, the closest thing to a "last gasp" before the band's sound completely fell apart (it would come back together, but much later), and it deserves respect as such. If you feel the overwhelming need to dive into 80s Sparks, this is the place to start.

I kinda sorta like three songs, though in each case I badly wish to hear them in different contexts. The opening title track, once I cut through the BIG DRAMATIC keyboard chords (which open the song and are featured in an extended instrumental break), manages to have some genuine tension built up in its minimal verse melody, with a clear release in the "All I hear is polite applause/APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE APPLAUSE" part of the chorus. The Plagiarism version, which swaps out the 80s production for strings, is much better, but this is ok enough. "With All My Might" is a weirdly earnest ballad (despite lyrics that repeatedly reference fighting dragons), but the keyboards are relatively unobstrusive, and the vocal melody is rather lovely, so it's a keeper as well. And finally, "Sisters" appears to be about a threesome with two sisters and the possible complications of such an excursion, with a chorus that has just enough in the way of twists to make it clearly stand out from the bulk of the album. Also, it briefly features Russell taking on the voice of the sisters in his falsetto, and the moment is worth a smirk.

Oh, but the rest. There's some enjoyment to be found in the blatant Prince ripoffs that are "Pretending to be Drunk," "Progress" and "Everybody Move," but in every case I'd rather listen the Purple One himself, so that resemblance doesn't work in their favor. "Love Scenes," "A Song That Sings Itself" and "Kiss Me Quick" are mid-tempo synth-heavy ballads that I'd never let myself be caught dead listening to if they came from anybody else, and I'll be happy to never hear them again. And finally, the two-part instrumental "Sparks in the Dark" (part one precedes "Everybody Move," while part two closes the album) is a go-nowhere waste of time, a dumping ground of disconnected synth riffs loosely formed into something coherent over a monotonous beat.

I originally planned to give this a slightly higher grade, but as I thought more about the contents of the album, I came to realize that I liked the "good" parts less than I thought I did and hated the bad parts more than I thought I did. Perhaps a Sparks diehard or somebody with a strong tolerance for the kind of production approach used on this album will be able to enjoy this, but as somebody who's neither, this album is death.

I would really like, for instance, to hear the title track and "Rosebud" with substantially different arrangements, because then they might be able to work their way into the second tier of Sparks material. The louder synth blasts of the title track are pretty obnoxious, but the vocal melody is infectious and way more developed than I would have expected, and the wailing backing vocals that pop up from time to time sound weirdly appropriate. Plus, there's no way that "Music that you can dance to/that and that alone is enough for me/Stark naked modern music/Hotter than your momma will ever be" is an earnest declaration of how Ron really felt about things at this point; I really have no idea why he would have been making music like this if he clearly felt a bit of self-loathing about it, but there's a tension in the song that's very intriguing. "Rosebud" has more silly big dramatic synths, but there's a darkness to the music that matches the darkness of the lyrics (about somebody trying to calm his dying lover and tell her everything will be fine after they've been in a terrible accident), and the song is able to overcome its more embarrassing aspects quite well.

"Armies of the Night" lightens up on the worse aspects of the album's production (they reappear during the middle but they retreat some in the early part of the song), and the song ends up working as a throwback to "All You Ever Think About is Sex" or "Dance Godammit," this time framing those who spend their nights partying as soldiers seeking to compel people to join their throng. The chorus of "The armies of the night are coming, they're coming/Life will be a dream for you and me/The armies of the night are coming, they're coming/Life will be a scream for you and me" feels like a classic Sparks chorus, and to have a genuinely classic Sparks chorus in the 80s is a boon. And finally, out of the good tracks, "Modesty Plays" is an updated version of a 1982 non-album single, and somehow the pounding beat and active synth parts work with the clever vocal melody delivering lyrics about a woman who's not as demure as she might be on the surface ("Don't underestimate the lady/She may seem cultured and demure/But there's another side and careful/She'll hit you like a 2 by 4").

So that's the good half; it's not perfect, but it's better than the good half of Rabbits at least. Unfortunately, I find the other half unbearable, though this is partially because the band was explicitly shooting for the dance club scene with this material. "Fingertips" (a cover of a Motown song that had first gained fame through Little Stevie Wonder) starts with a Russell falsetto of "Everybody sing Yeah, Yeah, say Yeah" over a dance beat and doesn't get any better; it's a bunch of keyboard blarings and various tacky exhortations (which would sound fine coming from Stevie Wonder but not from Russell Mael!!), and it goes against pretty much everything I like about Sparks. "The Scene" is 6:22 and multi-part, but it's essentially a bunch of obnoxious grooves superglued together, and I can't imagine ever wanting to listen to this. "Shopping Mall of Love" is decidedly not dance club music; it consists of fragments of sung and spoken bits over an awkward (but most definitely NOT danceable) drum beat, and it gets really old after about 30 seconds. And finally, "Let's Get Funky" may be built around the least pleasant sequence of synth chords ever put together, and while the lyrics are moderately amusing, hearing Russell sing with an odd twang over this foundation for six minutes makes for one of the worst possible experiences. I really have no idea if it's supposed to work on some satirical level or what, but I don't care if it's somehow the musical equivalent of Gulliver's Travels, I'm not touching it again.

While the album made a small dent in the dance club music scene, it once more made no impact on the music world at large, and the Bates Motel backing group finally had enough and left. Still, while it could hardly be said that they left on a high note, at least they helped make half an album of material that at least somewhat holds up. If you can find the good half without dealing with the bad (though hearing the bad half might be worth a laugh once), you should give those tracks at least a couple of listens.

PS: This was reissued in 1990 under the inexplicably misleading title The Best of Sparks: Music That You Can Dance To. That version swaps out "Armies of the Night" and replaces it with "Change," and as much as I like "Armies of the Night," I'd have to say that version would be a slight improvement. The song is hilariously spazz-tastic; much of it consists of Russell rambling all sorts of things over bass and finger snaps between big synth blasts, but the ramblings are fun, and the chorus is magnificent. The ramblings alternate between singing in amusing ways, and there are arrangement twists thrown in that make no logical sense but are compelling rather than annoying. That said, couldn't this have replaced something like "Shopping Mall of Love" so that both songs could have made it on?

There are some songs that stand out from the morass of hopelessly tacky keyboards and general 80s sludge. "The Toughest Girl in Town" and "Let's Make Love" have horrendous arrangements, of course, but I somehow find them kinda touching, and I quite like the silly way Russell makes use of his falsetto when singing "I feel it in my HEART! I feel it in my SOUL!" in the latter. At the same time, I can't make much of a reasonable justification for liking these tracks more than finding them pleasant in comparison to what's all around them. Let's hear it for lowered expectations!

Another song that stands out, though hardly in a way that allows me to call it "good" by any stretch, is the closing "Madonna," which is also done in three other languages in the bonus tracks. Ok, yes, I kinda like the simple-but-stupid chorus that pops up from time to time, but I just have a difficult time understanding why this track has to exist. I guess it's kind of a successor to "Change," in that it mostly features Russell talking over a series of repetitive keyboard meanderings, but "Change" had more interesting lyrics, more varied background and a better chorus. The story Russell tells, of having a one-night-stand with somebody he's pretty sure is Madonna, leaves me feeling more confused than anything else. Is this supposed to be some kind of rip by Ron on somebody who probably had no idea Ron even existed? Is it a fantasy? A satire? Meh.

The rest of the album is gross. I guess I feel a slight admiration for the construction of the various pieces of the opening "So Important," but even that one has such terrible arrangements that I can't imagine ever wanting to seek it out. The rest is full of overdone fake big drama in the keyboards crossed with faux-tough stretches (like in "Love-O-Rama"), and the thought of listening to this album one more time just makes me ill. There's also a two-minute instrumental in the bonus tracks called "The Big Brass Ring," but it's just a bunch of keyboard wanks piled on top of each other over booming drums, and it's no better than the typical material of the rest of the album. I'll probably turn back to the couple of good tracks from time to time, but I'll be glad to be rid of this album for good. Don't buy this before you've bought any other Sparks albums.

PS: For some reason, this received a reissue in 2001 under the name Just Got Back from Heaven. Don't buy that thinking you've uncovered some collection of rarities or anything like that.

It definitely helps that the album's first "real" song (I'm disregarding the silly jokes "Gratuitous Sax" and "Senseless Violins" which open and close the album, even if they're a delight and I wouldn't want to hear the album without them) is the group's best since the 70s. "When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'?" is a MONSTER of a great pop anthem, with lyrics about the regret that comes from always doing things the way other people expect of you, great keyboard parts on top of the generic techno beat, and a set of glorious melodies. I actually heard this song long after I heard most great Sparks songs, largely because its reputation was so impeccable that I wanted to reserve one last potential treat from the band for as long as I reasonably could, and it's every bit as great as I'd have hoped at the time. If you like Sparks and haven't heard this song yet, please please please find it and listen to it.

It's very easy, after the great opening track, to frame this album as one great track plus a bunch of techno blah, but that's not really fair. What strikes me most about this album is that, once I get beyond the techno aspects, I feel like I can sense the band's actual personality for the first time in a while. The lyrics tend to be genuinely clever and goofy, there's a lot of fun had with layering Russell's vocals, there are some ridiculous (in a good way) faux-operatic moments, there's some variety in the keyboard sounds, and there are clever and unconventional twists in the chord sequences. In other words, I feel like I'm actually listening to a Sparks album. "I Thought I Told You to Wait in the Car" (a lot of monologue interspersed with singing the title in the most overly dramatic way imaginable) and "Tsui Hark" (a drone with sporadic speaking by film director Tsui Hark) largely pass me by (though I kinda like some of the angrier beats in the former), but the rest is delightful. It doesn't get quite the same praise as "When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'?" does, and the idea of Russell Mael rapping is a little unsettling, but the chorus of "(When I Kiss You) I Hear Charlie Parker Playing" is glorious, and it helps me like the song almost as much as the more famous track that comes before it. I'm also quite the fan of "Now That I Own the BBC" (a lyrical throwback to the absurdity of "I Bought the Mississippi River" with a very playful tune) and "Let's Go Surfing" (with some terrible keyboard sounds playing beautiful keyboard parts while Russell sings lyrics that end up sounding majestic in context).

The other tracks are good enough. "Frankly, Scarlett, I Don't Give a Damn" and "Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil" are each mournful drones, the former featuring a nagging keyboard line echoed by Russell's "doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo" and the latter featuring an atmospheric-as-hell combination of Russell's normal voice and falsetto in the "chorus." Finally, "The Ghost of Liberace" is dinky silliness, but it's dinky silliness in a way that takes me back to the band's peak era, especially in the goofy chorus line of "The ghost of Liberace still has that mystique/If he were alive he'd now be at his peak" or in the "Sometimes he blinds the drivers with his shiny suits/They see that smile and they laugh at him, hey don't shoot" couplet.

It would have been very easy for the band to just give up after their flameout in the 80s, but I'm glad they had the desire and material for a comeback. If you're not the kind who minds the kind of production approach they took, you might even love this album, but all Sparks fans should definitely hear it.

So ok, it's a good effort, and one's expectations need to be tempered with a self-covers album, but I feel like the group could have done a little more with this project. In the 19 tracks (18 if you exclude "Orchestral Collage," which is basically just an extended introduction to the orchestrated "Number One Song in Heaven"), there are three tracks from Kimono (the two "This Town" versions plus "Amateur Hour"), four tracks from Propaganda (two versions of "Something for the Girl With Everything," one each of "Propaganda" and "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth") and three tracks from No. 1 In Heaven ("Beat the Clock" and the two parts of "Number One Song in Heaven"). This left a total of eight tracks for the rest of the band's career, one of which is devoted to "When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'?" (which was only three years old) and seven of which came from the 80s (and only some of which sound drastically different). These choices strike me as way too cautious on the whole; maybe this was the kind of material that the band was explicitly trying to emphasize as its legacy at this point, but I wish they'd been willing to poke into other corners of their past. Still, it's an enjoyable listen in the moment, and while it appears to be out of print at this writing, it's available for cheap in legal download form, and it's worth hearing for any fan of the band.

The opening title track establishes the more aggressive sound immediately, packing all sorts of noisy keyboard parts into the space above the busy percussion, while Russell speaks interesting lyrics interspersed with a chorus that makes prominent use of the title ("Balls! All you need are/Balls! To succeed are/Balls! All you need are ..."). The following "More Than a Sex Machine" is just as good, largely because of the silliness of Ron Mael writing lyrics around this title, but largely because of the moderately clever layering of the various upbeat keyboard parts underneath it. From there, the album goes in a gentler direction with "Scheherazade," largely based around an incessant synth noise that inevitably reminds me of Pac-man, but mostly featuring a softer mix of keyboards over which Russell sings a brief summary of "1001 Nights" (I have to admit that I find it stupidly funny that the last line is "I won't kill you").

Over the rest of the album, a few of the tracks ("Aeroflot," "Bullet Train," "It's Educational") feature the kind of up-tempo noisy techno pop of "Balls" and "More Than a Sex Machine" (not quite up to the standards of those tracks, but I don't skip them either) but the rest is more subdued and more prone to allowing for interesting musical ideas to develop. "The Calm Before the Storm" is up-tempo (aside from the opening slower bit) and based around some really cheesy keyboard tones, but I like the way the verses are clearly meant to be cheerier than the chorus, and I really like the part where three Russells start singing different parts with each other (plus, as Mark Prindle pointed out, the lyrics are oddly prescient). "How to Get Your Ass Kicked" and "It's a Knockoff" (which was featured in the soundtrack of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie) are both mid-tempo pop-ballads with clever lyrics that, with different arrangements, could have fit in well in many eras of the group. "Irreplacable" starts of potentially sounding like it will be another gentle song (possibly too much so), but then a new, darker melody in a much faster tempo bursts in, and the track does a great job of merging those two main ideas in its remainder (and the part where a piano part emerges to play that darker melody is probably the best stretch on the album). And finally, "The Angels" (which features a repeated use of profanity so out of place that it could easily be Ween) has a magnificent vocal part from Russell (especially in the way he soars in the "Me, I take it in stride/Me, I know I'm on the right side this time"), with a terrific balance of keyboards and even some clearly discernable guitars, and it lets the album end on a very high note.

No, this isn't one of my favorite Sparks albums, but as a follow-up to Gratuitous Sax it's a welcome one. Here's the thing: the last two times (before GS) that the group had successfully found a new direction for presenting keyboard-heavy dance-pop (No. 1 in Heaven and In Outer Space), the following albums (Terminal Jive and Pulling Rabbits Out of a Hat) had been massive disappointments. Maybe the group had managed to stagnate a bit (after all, they were guys in their 50s doing techno ...), but they'd stagnated at an acceptable level. This album isn't thought of as well as the ones that bookend it, but if somebody likes GS they should definitely give this a shot.

I really don't know exactly how the inspiration for this album's approach, which I will dub "chamber techno" even though not everything falls under that categorization, came to Russell and Ron, but the idea must have come to them in a pretty short span of time, because they started recording this album about a year after releasing Balls and released it about a year after that. To the extent that this album (at least the first seven tracks; the eighth and ninth tracks need to be categorized on their own) has a formula, it can be described as following this pattern:

1. The music is repetitive in a manner that best emulates techno.
2. The instrumentation is stripped down to a minimal number of keyboard parts, often using "orchestral" synth patches.
3. Percussion is minimal, mostly consisting of an occasional tympani, but certainly not used to generate the primary rhythmic pulse.
4. The primary rhythmic pulse, in turn, comes from the vocals, which tend to grab onto a small number of phrases and repeat them over and over, with occasional vocal asides.

In the first seven tracks, only one, "What Are All These Bands So Angry About?" breaks from the formula significantly (no techno here, though it does have big booming tympanies). The song is essentially an old man rant against kids and their music these days, but it's done in an impressive manner, correctly noting that bands can out-anger and out-profane each other only so much, and there's something oddly piercing about the "Some might have done what we'll never do" line (which comes after namechecking several great musicians) near the end. The formula itself, then, is forcefully introduced with the opening "The Rhythm Thief," which begins with Russell saying "I am the rhythm thief/Say goodbye to the beat/I am the rhythm thief/auf wiedersehen to the beat" over quiet synth strings and quiet repetitions of the phrase "rhythm rhythm rhythm thief," before exploding into a bombastic chorus of "OH NO! WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO, WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO, WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO? Lights out, Ibiza, WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO, WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO, WHERE DID THE GROOVE GO??" over very bombastic parts. The ensuing section is every bit as interesting, mostly because the main rhythmic strike comes from "back" in the phrase "You'll never get it back, you'll never get it back/The rhythm thief has got it and you'll never get it back ..." but also because of the busy bombast coming from Ron's keys underneath. Over the rest of the song, these two main sections are repeated over and over, in whole and in part, until the final conclusion where the introduction, the chorus, and the "never get it back" sections are largely smooshed together. To be honest, I think that Ron missed a chance for an extra level of subversion (especially given the album title) which could have come if he'd bothered to put the sections into sonata form (which could be done with a little bit of reordering), but overall the song is a magnificent statement, not only as a tone-setter for the album but also a full rejection of its techno-pop past.

"How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall" (or, as Russell pronounces it in a way that drives my wife batty, 'Car-NEG-ie Hall') is another clear instance of the formula, except for the fact that orchestral patches are pushed aside (the more bombastic moments don't pretend to be anything other than synths) and that the keyboards are set to sound like a grand piano. The lyrics and rhythmic drive are based around Russell incessantly reciting the setup and punchine of the old "How do I get to Carnegie Hall"/"Practice, man, practice!" joke, with a smattering of other lyrics and occasional other looped bits, like the word "Steinway" or "bravo!" over rhythmic applause and the busy piano. Amidst all of the main chunks of the song, though, I've always found the quiet "still there is no sign of you" line as the most impactful bit.

After "What Are All These Bands So Angry About?" comes "I Married Myself," a quieter song that I used to skip whenever I listened to the album, and while I still don't quite love it, I like it more than I used to. I would best describe it as "variations on a theme from two snippets of an unwritten Wings ballad," and I don't love the bits that are repeated (not to mention that tapping into the same general idea as "Falling in Love With Myself Again" irritates me a little), I've come to like them. Much better is "Ride 'Em Cowboy," which is propelled by electric piano (with occasional synth strings and synth harpsichord draped on top) while Russell sings all sorts of brief snippets hinting at stories of going from bad to worse (sample lines: "From wowed to bored/Ole, then gored").

After "Cowboy" is a track that, along with "The Rhythm Thief," best displays the potential of this album to take simple ideas, repeated incessantly, and make them into something great. "My Baby's Taking Me Home" consists of Russell singing the chorus well over 100 times, with the music building from a simple set of keyboard lines into a thickly arranged explosion (complete with snippets of actual guitar and actual drums), and with a fascinating mid-song monologue that fits in perfectly with the atmosphere of the rest. The song taps into the same kind of anthemic simplicity that used to fuel songs like "Hey Jude" or "Isn't it a Pity," and while that won't win anybody over who hates those songs, it works just fine for somebody like me who loves them. On the other side of the spectrum, though, comes the best example of the album's potential to be annoying as hell. "Your Call is Very Important to Us, Please Hold" is amusing for about 30 seconds, with the opening "I'm getting mixed signals, mixed signals, mixed mixed mixed signals" bit and the first glimpse of the main portion of the song, but the rest of the song makes for one of the longest and most excruciating 4:11 experiences I can think of. I guess that part of the point of the song was to call up the same level of stress and aggravation that comes from being put on hold for a long time, and I respect the effort, but I feel like they went too far. Once again, Sparks shows its ability to mess up in even the best of circumstances.

"Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls" sets the situation right, though. At first it sounds like it's going to be a lovely ballad, albeit with an amusingly bitter title, but then a piercing "wah wah wah wah" from multiple Russells pops up, and then there's a lumbering metallic guitar sound (from Faith No More guitarist Dean Menta), and then suddenly the track becomes the first heavy-guitar-based Sparks song since Big Beat (not counting Plagiarism). The lyrics primarily consist of a really long rant about gold-digging women ending up with ugly rich guys, and while the pedantic detail it goes into could be considered obnoxious, the combination of the rant with pseudo-tough guitars, pounding drums and repeated interjections like "it ain't done with smoke and mirrors!" (as well as repeated instances of the "wah wah wah wah" bit) manages to make the track rather intriguing. It sounds like nothing else on the album to this point, and while the track is a little ridiculous, the contrast between it and the rest of the album is enough to make it a crucial piece of the album.

Finally, the closing vaudeville-inspired "Suburban Homeboy" has pretty much nothing in common with the rest of the album, and it could be considered an out-of-place novelty piece if somebody felt so inclined, but I love it to pieces anyway. The lyrics take on an easy target, namely rich white teenagers (and, in the last verse, rich white graduates of fancy schools) who pretend to be black and ghetto, and while there's a bit of a "shooting fish in a barrel" to it, the lyrics are so silly that I can forgive the relatively low degree of difficulty. "I am a suburban homeboy with a suburban ho right by my side/I am a suburban homeboy and I say 'yo dawg' to my detailing guy." If I'm stupid for liking this song so much, so be it.

Overall, I like this album about as much as I can like any album without quite loving it. After all, it does have a song ("Your Call...") that I really don't like much, and another song ("I Married Myself") that I tend to find a little boring. Plus, as much as I really respect and admire the cleverness needed to take an approach completely unlike any I've ever heard elsewhere, I admit that I sometimes catch myself thinking that the songs go too long, even if their excessive length is part of the point. Honestly, though, these are just nit-picks. If it's not quite on the level of the debut or Kimono, then it's very close, and every Sparks fan (who somehow doesn't know this album already) needs to own this. Let's hear it for the one of the all-time great comeback albums, too.

The resulting album was about as good as could have been hoped for. In relation to LB, I will say that Hello Young Lovers is nowhere near a LB clone, but it's also an album that I can't imagine Sparks being able to make if they hadn't made LB first. There are definitely some familiar features from LB on here: the vocals break out of singing into speaking (sometimes rhythmic, sometimes not) pretty frequently, there are many phrases that are incessantly repeated, and Ron frequently uses orchestral (and occasionally harpsichord) patches in his keyboard parts. Beyond these common principles, however, the albums are quite different; there's a lot more guitar here (it's actually woven into several songs, as opposed to being lightly drizzled in the background occasionally or used for shock value), and there's a genuine swing in a lot of the songs that hadn't been a regular part of Sparks albums since Indiscreet or maybe bits of Introducing Sparks. All told, this is a great sound for the band at this stage of its career, and it made it 100% clear that the band's techno days were over (after all, LB still had one foot in the past with its chamber-techno leanings).

My initial impression on hearing the opening "Dick Around" was that this was one of the greatest things I'd ever heard, one of the most ridiculous tracks I'd ever heard, or possibly both, and I've essentially settled on the "both" choice. The lyrics tell of the rise and fall and eventual rise of a corporate go-getter who loses his woman and job and eventually gets the woman back, while in the interim he just dicks around, but just describing the lyrics doesn't begin to describe the song. Multi-track faux-operatic rapid-fire Russell is in full-force, with a solo Russell only appearing occasionally (making it all the more noteworthy when he does), and the music careens from "How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?" piano to metallic heavy rock to jazzy interludes in a way that seems preposterous on first listen but makes total sense thereafter (at least it did for me). There are too many interesting moments and lyrics in the song to give a full accounting, but I will say (a) that the first time the distorted guitars come in during the "Pull yourself up off the ground ..." verse is one of the great guilty pleasures in my life, (b) the lyrics in the "rise" part tell a pretty evocative story in not that many words, and (c) the chorus ("All I do now is dick around/When the sun goes up and the moon goes down/And the leaves are green and the leaves are brown/And all I do now is dick around") is just gobs of fun to sing when I listen to this. Plus, this track out-Queens Queen so heavily (after Sparks had more or less given birth to Queen) that it almost eliminates Queen's need to exist. The following "Perfume" is a rather fascinating up-tempo mix of piano, bass and grumbly guitars, with Russell matching a bunch of women (with the implication that these are all romantic interests from his past) with their choices of perfume, and him choosing to be with a girl who doesn't wear any perfume because she won't remind him of any of those women. So sue me, it's a ridiculous bit, but when Russell speaks, "The olefactory sense is the sense/That most strongly evokes memories of the past/Well, screw the past!" it cracks me up every time, and it's a fun diversion in the midst of a great song.

The next three tracks all have some clearly discernable weakness or another, but I still quite like all of them. "The Very Next Night" is slow, dreary, repetitive, and has almost no singing (Russell is talking through most of the song, apart from occasional sung background parts or snippets of melody here and there), but I feel like it deserves some notice for the way it depicts an angry drunk who won't take responsibility for his behavior. The lyrics describe a guy who keeps getting in fights over his woman, and who keeps offering pathetic excuses like "How can I let it go if I can't control myself?/How can I let it go if I cannot help myself?" in the context of repetition that strikes me every time as a depiction of double vision and not seeing the world clearly. Musically, it's mostly atmospheric piano, but there's a lovely and sad harpsichord bit in the middle, and the emergence of the grumbly guitars near the end always strongly suggest to me an especially bad episode coming on. It's not the most interesting track in the world, but I like it a lot more than I once did.

"(Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country?" was, unfortunately, the victim of some sort of weird censorship, the details of which I don't actually know, and the version that ultimately made the album feels neutered. The version that made it onto a B-side contains lyrics that are surprisingly political and pretty pointed in their silliness, but the album version removes those lyrics and replaces them with Russell reciting the first verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" instead. Oh well, even without the better verses, the chorus is delightful, and the interaction between the guitars and the bouncy synths make the song fly by. Closing out the first half is "Rock, Rock, Rock," and while it struck me as really stupid on the first few listens (namely because the idea of Russell Mael singing "I will rock, rock, rock/Like a mother, like a mother, like a mother, like a mother" in a "Rhythm Thief" manner struck me as too silly even for Sparks), I came around to it once I made an effort to pay attention to the whole song. Basically, the song is about somebody whose significant other is threatening to leave him because he shows no passion in his life, and in his pleading to keep them from going he promises to cast away the soft musical passages of his life and to rock, rock, rock instead. There's a bit more to the song than just the lyrics and the big bombast of the music (for instance, I find the little vocal echoes from time to time intriguing), but those are ultimately the focus, and they're good enough for me.

The second half of the album is really strong, apart from the three-minute waltz-like throwaway of "There's No Such Thing as Aliens," which doesn't so much commit the crime of annoying me as it just makes almost no impression no matter how many times I hear it. "Metaphor" would be good if it only featured its marvelous hook of "Chicks, dig, dig, d-i-g, dig, dig metaphors," but it also features some fun call-and-response between Russell and other Russells, and the balance between keyboards and guitars perfect. Plus, "Use them wisely/Use them well/And you'll never know the hell of loneliness" is just such an insightful lyric. "Waterproof" is about somebody with a peculiar dual immunity to getting wet from rain and also from being swayed by tears, and the song's build from a playful duet between a solo Russell and Ron into an anthemic army of Russells over Ron's keyboards and guitars is a joy to behold. Plus it has those jazzy breaks of Russell semi-singing "The skies are starting to cloud up/But that won't slow me down ..." between the various iterations of the great verse and chorus melodies, and silly lines like "Completely dry/Dry as a Navajo in August ..." and "I see you crying but I'm not buying your Meryl Streep mimicry ..." scattered throughout. And "Here Kitty," while it probably would have been done in a way that would have annoyed me to death had it been written during the LB sessions, ends up as a great exercise in layering different Russell vocal lines on top of each other, and this is a track that I'd love to hear done by a college glee club or something along those lines.

The album concludes with "As I Sit Down to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral," which is easily one of the longest and most intricate tracks in the Sparks catalogue. The song starts with about 90 seconds of different variations on the phrase "Bye bye bye my baby/Now it's time time time for me to go to/Work work Work/So you might want to work your way from here" over guitars and keyboards with odd tones, before moving into a song centered around a nagging upwards organ lick over which Russell sings lyrics devoted to a fascinating premise. Basically, the organist (a) is irritated that the bulk of his audience cares more about God than about his performance, and (b) is totally trying to use his organ playing to pick up girls, targeting those who are inside to get out of the rain more than for any religious purpose. The music is full of "Hallelujah!" chants and sung "La, la ..." parts to that upwards organ lick (the use of the repeated "I believe!" bits sandwiched around the "La, la" parts during a part of the song that is the organist getting lucky amuses me to no end) and lots of entertaining bombast that all make this into a great ending.

In the end, I can't really figure out whether I like this album more or less than LB, but the difference either way would only be the tiniest bit, so it doesn't really matter. There are definitely enough small things (I didn't really emphasize the repetition much in this review, but there are small moments where repeated bits get on my nerves) to keep this from a higher grade, but regardless of exact grade, this album firmly established the Sparks comeback as legitimate, and this makes the album an important inclusion to a Sparks collection. Or, for that matter, a rock rock rock collection.

As often happens with cases where the promotional campaign is particularly inspired, the actual product being promoted is a slight letdown, even if it's got a lot of good material and is quite good on the whole. The biggest change with this album from the previous ones is that the remaining Lil' Beethoven elements from Hello Young Lovers are virtually wiped away; there's a lot of repetition in the vocal parts, but this repetition is much more conventional than on LB or some of the parts of HYL, and the instrumentation, while still based primarily in Ron's keyboards, rarely attempts the faux-orchestral sounds of yore. For all of the various eccentricities of this album, this is definitely a very normal album in comparison to what they'd done lately; Russell spends most of his time doing actual singing of actual vocal melodies, while Ron uses a variety of keyboard sounds that mostly sound pretty great. This isn't a good thing or a bad thing in and of itself, but I do suspect that the slightly higher concentration than usual of clearly second-rate material has at least some correlation to the lack of a unifying gimmick for the album. Again, it's a really good album on the whole, but it's definitely a clear step down from LB and HYL.

The best demonstration of the issues this album often has is "Strange Animal," which has some decent ideas that feel more like they were superglued to each other than made into a coherent song, and it makes for a pretty problematic 5:45. There are also a couple of tracks tucked near the end that, if they don't outright suck, are knocking on the door pretty hard. "The Director Never Yelled Cut" prominently features one of the least pleasant loops of Ron keyboards this side of "Let's Get Funky," and the verse melody is so oddly mechanical that I'm not sure why they ultimately decided it was a good idea to include it on the album. "Photoshop" sounds like a potential classic for about 15 seconds, but the combination of a great piano part and a tense Russell delivery ends up largely being wasted on a song where the central hook is the dumb chorus of "Photoshop me out of your life." I get that Ron was trying to update his "odd takes on dealing with exes" for the late 2000s, but this really ends up sounding like a stale variation of better attempts at this kind of writing.

The rest of the album is really good, though, and the highs are high enough to mostly overcome the low points. The first half starts and ends with "Intro" and "Intro Reprise," respectively, and they're a delightful bit of Russell harmonizing with himself around the great phrase, "I don't care if you love me, just so you like me" and wordless "aaah" sounds. Immediately following "Intro" comes "Good Morning," an amusing up-tempo song with Russell falsetto-singing about waking up with a woman that's way out his league and not understanding how this is possible, while Ron lays down a fantastic keyboard pattern on (electric?) piano and synths. The lyrics are full of silly lines, such as "While I fix you breakfast/I hope it's just your laugh that is infectious" or "Hey, where you going? Does dasvedonya really mean good morning?" and the alternation between the main groove and the "Thank you God for something rare as this ..." parts is quite nice. I also really dig the false ending.

"I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All the Crap in This Song" and "Let the Monkey Drive" each boast their own great keyboard grooves with great vocal parts on top, with the former boasting a slower, more intense one and the latter boasting a quicker, snappier one. "I Can't Believe ..." ends up using a bunch of different synth tones, and there's a surprising amount of complexity in the details of what seems like a pretty simple track on first listen. "Let the Monkey Drive" is a rare instance of breaking out an orchestral patch (tucking it into the background mostly, but it's there), but the main attraction of the song is definitely the groove in the parts where the monkey is driving the car, and you'd better believe that I find myself doing response vocals to Russell's parts if nobody else is around.

The second half does have the surprising low points mentioned earlier, but it also has a bunch of really delightful material. "I've Never Been High" is a majestic anthemic ballad from its first moments, but it also has a rather interesting part in the middle where the chorus fragments into Russell repeatedly singing "I've never ah ah/I've never ah ah" before returning to the main part of the song. Lyrically, it's more or less a successor to "When Do I Get to Sing My Way?" in that it reflects on experiences never had, and the fact that he's never been high is hardly a point of celebration. Then it's off to the land of silly misogyny with "She Got Me (Pregnant)," a pseudo-ethnic (in the same way as "Goofing Off") song that's either about (a) an alternate reality in which women impregnate men and the man feeling angry about being used, or (b) the woman manipulating the man into getting her pregnant ... and the man feeling angry about being used. And best of all there's "Lighten Up, Morrissey," a guitar-heavy rocker about a guy who has difficulties with women because he's not as awesome as Morrissey. "She won't hang out with me, no, she won't hang out/'Til my biting wit bites like his/She won't hang out with me, no she won't hang out/'Til my quick retort's quick as his" is typical fare for the song, and I like the fact that, in the chorus, some of the iterations of the title end in a question mark (as if he's afraid to offend Morrissey by making such a request).

"This is the Renaissance" kinda sounds like a HYL leftover, what with the combination of the bombastic drums and the guitar using a tone that was pretty commonplace on that album, and it's basically a chance for Ron to write silly lyrics about the benefits of the Renaissance in relation to the Middle Ages. Sample lyric: "Science is here/Nothing left to fear/Though the Earth is flat/It's not as flat as we feared/Music's gone wild/No Gregorian here/Contrapuntal music is the music that your parents fear." It's not really an album highlight, but it's definitely not a lowlight either. And finally, just when it seems that the album has taken a pretty steep dive after "Lighten Up, Morrissey," the album closer "Likeable" redeems things more than a bit. It really seems like Ron is writing out a sad desperate fantasy here, where he easily gets along with everybody around him and everybody wants to be his friend. The song is energetic but angry and mournful, with Russell frequently using rhythmic speaking in a HYL manner over the hyperactive keyboard and guitar parts, and except for the semi-cheerful carnival music in the "No-one ever wears a frown ..." parts, the song really gives the sense of somebody yelling "I'M LIKEABLE! I'M LIKEABLE!" into a mirror before going outside to deal with society. The return to the "I don't care if you like me, just so you love me ..." parts from the beginning of the album is a nice touch as well.

The album's a bit of a mixed bag on the whole, yes, but there's so much really good material that I feel like this grade is justified. Given that Ron was well over 60 at this point and Russell was nearly as old, this album has to be considered a significant success by any reasonable standard. If you liked the last two albums you'll probably like this one, but be aware that it doesn't really sound the same.

I suppose it should be considered a success that this project isn't a complete disaster. There are a handful of really memorable and interesting bits, even if a lot of the album consists of "transitional" material. "Why Do You Take That Tone With Me?" features a great vocal from opera singer Rebecca Sjöwall, depicting an angry Hollywood starlet who doesn't like the condescension that Bergman oozes with every word and action on the set, and there's a good deal of dramatic heft in it. "Limo Driver (Welcome to Hollywood)" offers a chance to hear Ron sing for the first time (spoiler alert: it's a good thing Russell usually sings), but it makes for a fun ditty, and the following "Mr. Bergman, How Are You?" does an entertaining job of depicting the attempts of the Hollywood executives to try and woo Bergman over. "The Studio Commissary" is a fun chance to namecheck a bunch of famous directors getting lunch over a vaudeville tune, "Autograph Hounds" has great interplay between the disorienting vocals and some intense synths, "Oh My God" (where Bergman asks for deliverance) is a decent emotional climax, and "Garbo Sings" (where Greta Garbo brings deliverance) is a great reprise of themes from earlier. Oh, and I guess that "He's Home" makes for a fitting, joyful ending.

For all of the good that this album provides, though, there are some fundamental flaws that are hard to escape. One of these is that, while we're clearly supposed to empathize with Bergman as he seeks refuge from the awfulness that is Hollywood, it's hard to tell exactly how he's been wronged here (well, aside from the weird teleportation kidnapping that kicks off the whole thing). Bergman really comes across as a prick, especially when he's on set (this sequence may or may not be in his mind, but then again the whole album may or may not be in his mind), and quite honestly I find myself siding with the Hollywood Studio Chief when he sings, "We've offered him the moon/Rejected us like goons/And all the while unfazed, his eyes were dull and glazed/But all that's in the past./He really has some gall/To turn us down at all/He really has some gall to turn us down at all/Is anyone that great?" near the end. If Ron and Russell meant for the listener to sympathize completely with Bergman, they didn't really succeed.

A second major problem comes from the baffling decision to make the English-language version available only as a digital download, with all 64 minutes contained within a single track. The provided rationale for this was essentially that they wanted people to have to listen to this as a whole, to treat it as a serious piece of art rather than a collection of individual tracks, but I find this explanation unsatisfying simply because musicals generally are broken up into individual tracks. This is a rare instance of the group taking itself much too seriously, and it's a little off-putting.

Despite these issues, though, I'd have to say that this is a decent album on the whole, and one that any serious Sparks fan should listen to two or three times. Yes, when Bergman solemnly intones near the end, "Thank you for listening to my story. You may be relieved to know the story is soon coming to an end" I find myself thinking "Damn straight," but it's a still very competent and well-crafted piece of work on the whole. I can't imagine wanting to listen to it more than two or three more times in my life, but I'm glad I listened to it as many times as I did.

This set is worth hearing and is basically enjoyable, but it's underwhelming on the whole. I would say there are two significant highlights that stand out from the rest. The first is a rendition of "Singing in the Shower," a track that originated in a post-Interior Design collaboration with Les Rita Mitsouko and had an absolutely horrendous arrangement but sounds quite nice when given a sparser music hall treatment. The second is the version of "The Number Song in Heaven" that they perform in the encore, focusing on the first half of the song and giving Russell's incredibly well-preserved 64-year-old falsetto a chance to shine. Plus, the moment when Ron switches from the angelic choir keyboard parts into the more rhythmic sequenced sounds is a great and memorable one.

Aside from these performances, though, the lack of a full band ends up forcing pretty much all of the set into a fairly limited sonic space, and most of the renditions on here end up as amusing trifles. The setlist is heavy on albums that could provide material for such an approach, of course; Propaganda contributes 4 tracks (the title track, "At Home, At Work, At Play," "Something for the Girl With Everything," "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth"), Indiscreet ("Hospitality on Parade," "Under the Table With Her"), No. 1 in Heaven ("The Number One Song in Heaven", "Beat the Clock") and Hello Young Lovers ("Metaphor," a sadly shortened "Dick Around") 2 a piece , Lil' Beethoven 3 ("My Baby's Taking Me Home," "The Rhythm Thief," "Suburban Homeboy"), and there are scattered tracks from here and there. Kimono only has the obligatory "This Town" nod (and boy it sounds odd without guitar), the 80s are only acknowledged with "Singing in the Shower" and "Sherlock Holmes," Exotic Creatures only has "Good Morning" to represent it, and of course there's "When Do I Get to Sing My Way?" to close off the main set. There's also a really dumb rarity called "The Wedding of Jacqueline Kennedy to Russell Mael" (in which Russell pretends to get married to Jacqueline Kennedy and Ron plays the Wedding March), a short medley of material from The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, and a totally forgettable new song at the end in the title track. Oh, and there's a fun keyboard medley at the beginning called "Sparks Overture," where some songs that made the album are joined by others that were probably performed but not recorded ("I Married Myself" and "Looks, Looks, Looks" are recognizable in addition to "Good Morning," "When Do I Get to Sing My Way," "This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us," "Dick Around," "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth," "Something for the Girl With Everything" and "Suburban Homeboy"). Many of these tracks sound just fine, but there's little here that I'd go out of my way to hear in place of the corresponding original, and that's something I need to rate a live album highly.

Honestly, if this ends up as the only live album they ever put out, I'll find myself wishing that they'd never bothered; it would have been better to have the gaping "what-if" than to answer it with a relative throwaway. Anybody who fancies themselves as a hardcore fan should seek this out, and it's worth a few listens, but a casual fan could do well to stay away.

Of course, since this is a Sparks album, this inevitably contains a mix of material that I love and a bunch of material that makes me go, "Ehn, it's fine." The main album (there are 4 bonus tracks, which I'll get to later, in the deluxe edition of the album) has 12 tracks, and the track sequencing pulls off the remarkable feat of starting with 3 awesome tracks and ending with 3 awesome tracks while stuffing 6 decent tracks in the middle (I'm pretty sure I've never come across this kind of symmetry before). Aside from the quiet droning balladry of "Little Guy From the Suburbs" and the slightly chiller-than-typical electro pop of "Things I Won't Get," the other tracks in this stretch take on a similar style as the best material on the album but always strike me as a clear step down from that material. I mean, I'll be fine listening to these tracks ("Police Encounters," "Save Me From Myself," "So Desu Ne," "The Man Without a Tan") from time to time, and they have fun arrangements and silly/clever lyrics, but every time I've listened to this album, I've always found them a little disappointing after the album's incredible start and always find myself wishing for the last three tracks to come around.

With half of the album more-or-less dismissed with a "they're ok," hand-wave, it may seem implausible for this album to get such a high rating, but you have to understand, I REALLY like the other six tracks. The opening "Johnny Delusional" begins with Alex and Russell each singing a couple of lines before breaking into a massive anthemic chorus, and the song is a nearly perfect melding of the band's Kimono/Propaganda style with its Hello Young Lovers/Exotic Creatures of the Deep style. "Call Girl" (where 'Call' is an imperative verb, not an adjective as I initially assumed) is great low-key trashy dance-pop, which doesn't exactly go into No. 1 Song in Heaven territory with its lyrics (though "I gave up blow and adderall for you/So I'd have dough and spend it all on you" is a pretty choice line) but is nonetheless very memorable and interesting; the synth backdrop to the whole song is great, and the "Come on, girl / Come on and give me a ring ..." lines are constantly getting stuck in my head. "Dictator's Son" sounds like a top-notch Hello Young Lovers song (with a dirtier, more modern treatment in the vocals, but with all sorts of weird hyperactive twists that sound just like what they were going for at that time) in the portions of the song centered on Russell, and the song has an interesting secondary Alex-centric part that provides a good balance. The lyrics are solid as well, telling the story of a son who's defecting from his homeland because he's gotten bored with the family trade and likes the typical things of a young man in his early 20s.

After the album's rip-roaring start, it goes into its aforementioned extended lull, but it eventually comes back in full force with "The Power Couple," a terrific mish-mash of pounding drums, vocal call-and-response, all sorts of instrumental and production stuff shoved into the background, and lyrics about desperately wanting to impress some people who are coming over for dinner. As much as I like this track and the ones that started off the album, though, they ultimately pale to the pair that close out the album. "Collaborations Don't Work" is the band going as hilariously meta as they can possibly go; the song starts with a quiet acoustic guitar indie-rock version of the main theme from Franz Ferdinand, then a quintessentially bombastic synth-orchestra version of the same theme from Sparks, and the song turns into a battle of musical styles and ideas that comes out weirdly reminiscient of something like "The Soft Parade," with lyrics that talk about the pitfalls that come with the two sides trying to gel their ideas into something coherent. By the time of the final lines ("I ain't no collaborator/I am the master, independent/If I ever need a father, it won't be you, old man"), the song has turned into a top-notch clever rocker before the two sides are basically singing their original ideas together (with Sparks winning, I suppose, thanks to Ron getting to play quiet piano for the last 20 seconds). And finally, "Piss Off" brings the album back into Propaganda territory, largely thanks to its chorus, but also thanks to glorious moments like when the angelic choir voices are brought out in the "I want to HARMONIZE/I want to HARMONIZE" part. The "I gaze into my crystal ball/I see a future free for all" part is gorgeous too, even if it's all to brief.

All told, the standard version of the album, with 12 tracks and ending with "Piss Off," would merit a low-ish A, which is pretty high considering how I feel about the middle chunk of the album. Simultaneous to the standard release, though, was a deluxe version with 4 additional bonus tracks, and these tracks are so great that they bring the grade up a notch, and if some of the weaker tracks in the middle had been swapped out in favor of these I'd rate it even higher. "So Many Bridges" pulls off the remarkable achievement of combining the modernityPropaganda cross of the bulk of the album (with a great recurring synth line) with a completely unexpected detour into the Sparks-era of the band; the "Right in the Oklahoma/We'd rather go/Paris and San Francisco/How can we go?" part may keep the same underpinning instrumental pattern of the rest of the song, but the tone in Russell's voice and the way he bends his voice is unlike anything he'd done in more than 40 years, and it works perfectly in context. "King of the Song" starts off sounding like it might be another quiet Sparks-ish music hall number, but midway it turns into Alex doing a faux-macho assertion that he, in fact, is the king of the song, before returning to the original melody, and the effect is rather amusing. "Look at Me" is 5:42 of guitar-laced dance-rock bliss, mixing a pounding groove with intriguing lyrics (with intense delivery up to the task) depicting obsessive jealously for another's attention, and while it's hard for me to give a more comprehensive summary of the song than that, just know that I rank it just a hair behind "Collaborations Don't Work" and "Piss Off" in terms of song quality. And finally, "A Violent Death" is 100% Sparks, Alex's vocals notwithstanding, with Russell and Alex speak-singing over a nagging piano line and drums, resolving into a gentle and uplifting chorus from time to time, and while "Piss Off" makes for a great anthemic end to the regular album, I think this makes a terrific finish to the whole experience.

This may not be a flawless album, but it's a really enjoyable one nonetheless, and it's as successful of a collaboration between two established groups as I can think of. In Sparks terms, it just tickles me that, in their late 60s and 7 years removed from their previous "regular" album (I'm not counting Ingmar Bergman for these purposes), they still had it in them to not only make interesting music but to infuse it with an energy I never would have imagined at this late of a date. Anybody who likes the 21st version of Sparks should be all over this album (er, and I guess Franz Ferdinand fans would probably want this too, though I don't know how jarring they'd find it).

Let's not get carried away with this idea, of course; this isn't Blackstar we're talking about. Far from a dark unified rumination of impending death, this album is filled with the blend of smartass lyrical topics and keyboard-centric music-hall-tinged pop that one would generically expect from the band (this album is very much a blend of the styles of their albums from the 70s and the 00s, and Russell still sounds shockingly great). The moments when Ron is clearly thinking about aging and his place in life as a consequence of aging aren't especially pervasive, but they're definitely present, and when they appear they're rather striking. In some cases, the sentiment is pretty blatant; for instance, the opening "Probably Nothing" is a lovely vocal meandering over Ron's keyboards that is pretty clearly about having some sort of mental decline but not being so far gone that you're immune to knowing that you're experiencing decline. Or, for instance, take "Bummer" (notably punctuated by the repeated operatic delivery of the title) which is about going to the funeral of a friend (though in typical Sparks fashion it's about getting bored at a funeral: "All of them prattle on / Even your widow yawns"). The best of these musings, though, comes from "I Wish You Were Fun," a prime Wings-impersonation that (to me, anyway) relates to the frustrations Ron and Russell would have in dating women around their age when all of their potential romantic partners would tend towards the old and serious while the Maels had stopped emotionally aging about 45 years earlier. Both the main melody (sample lyrics: "I wish you were fun / I wish you were fun to be around / I wish you were fun / You say that your favorite color's brown / In every other way I find you amazing but one / I wish you were fun / I wish you were fun") and the secondary melody (sample lyrics: "No one ever changes, why even mention it? Calling attention it leads to the tension that's not / Helpful, back off and accept what you have in hand / Glad that she's no Ayn Rand, humorless to the n'th degree") are amazing, and on the whole I'd have to consider this one of the better songs the band ever made.

The rest of the album is generally not so weighty, and much of it could have fit in well on Hello Young Lovers, Exotic Creatures, or even earlier albums. The one other song that strikes me at all as having deeper meaning (about reaching an age where you finally become satisfied with doing things a certain way and not having to impress other people) is, fittingly for Sparks, a song called "Missionary Position," which is about exactly what you think it's about ("And the acrobats, well, they tend to scoff / All you know is that you can get her off / And you feel alright, the stars are bright, the missionary position"), a big bombastic number that could have fit in on Propaganda just fine. My favorite of the rest is the closing "Life with the Macbeths," a dark harpsichord-laden number with a big operatic vibe (and a great cameo from Rebecca Sjöwall, who had previously appeared on The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman), but I'm also very fond of "What the Hell is it This Time?" and its dramatic (with lots of orchestral synths) depiction of God getting sick of people pestering him with every single little thing in their prayers ("His plate is filled with famine and with clean, wholesome air / If Arsenal wins, he really don't care"). I'm also quite fond of the piano-heavy "Edith Piaf (Said it Better Than Me)" (about somebody who wants to empathize with the "I regret nothing" message of her famous song but whose life was too boring for that; I guess it's sort of a repeat of "When Do I Get to Sing 'My Way'?" but I won't hold it against them) and the dark, jittery but bombastic "So Tell Me Mrs. Lincoln Aside From That How Was the Play?" about somebody who obsesses over details to an extent that keeps him from doing the routine things he's suposed to do (like catch a bus).

Among the rest, there aren't any songs I dislike, but there are some songs (like the bass-heavy "Giddy" or the oddly-structured and frenetic "The Amazing Mr. Repeat") that fade a little bit into the background as I'm working my way through the album. Rather than go through the rest individually (and to be clear, I like all of the rest just fine, especially the shimmering "Scandinavian Design" and the majestic "A Little Bit Like Fun")), I do want to defend the title track a bit. On my first couple of listens, I thought the track was trash, a low grade rehash of the kind of repetitive pseudo-bombast that had worked so well on Hello Young Lovers. A couple of things about the song eventually won me over to the point that I now genuinely enjoy the song every time I hear it. First, the words they use to rhyme with "Hippopotamus" just get more and more ridiculous as the song goes on: Ron ends up rhyming with "Hieronymous" (as in Hieronymous Bosch, the painter), "Anonymous," "Volkswagen Microbus," "Titus Andronicus," and "Abacus," as though he had a bet with Russell as to just how ridiculous he could make the rhymes by the end. Second, the "commentaries" on each of the different items now in his pool (or the people in posession of them) are absurd in a way that I find delightful, especially near the end when it's just saying "Not that I'm prejudiced" over and over again.

If this isn't their last album, then it should be. It sounds very familiar, yes, but not in a way that I find offensive, and I can't imagine a fan of late-period Sparks disliking this, nor can I think of a better way for their last album to finish than with the bombast of "Life With the Macbeths" (a Japanese version has a bonus track, "You've Earned the Right to be a Dick," and it's a fine guitar-heavy anthem, but I don't consider it the proper closer). God bless those weirdos.

Indeed, this album is full of songs that make the album sound really intriguing when I'm not fully paying attention, but if I try to pick out tracks I'd consider clearly great, I find that I struggle a bit. The album certainly starts and ends on high notes: the opening "All That" (featuring acoustic guitar and hand claps) is an instant anthem, perhaps a little rote and predictable in the music, but still a delightful way to ease into the album; and the closing "Please Don't Fuck Up My World" is a surprisingly touching plea for people to not ruin things (whether in ecological terms or societal terms) after they're gone (at least that's how I hear it). In between, some other tracks definitely stand out for me, such as the silly "Stravinsky's Only Hit," which makes ample use of the famous orchestral strikes from "Firebird" in support of a silly scenario where Igor Stravinsky writes a big hit pop song and initially loves all of his new fame before having second thoughts. My favorite, though, is "One for the Ages," a shimmering ball of tension built around a mournful piano with a vocal melody and chorus that's restrained that I'm tempted to hear as underwritten but which I prefer to hear as the band avoiding the temptation to overwrite it (you don't want the vocal to distract too much from the instrumental part, after all).

So that's four tracks, which leaves ... a lot of tracks. And they're good! For the most part. They have interesting lyrics (or at the least, they have interesting one-off lines that would really be striking to somebody not already well-acquainted with the band) and interesting arrangements and lots of things that make for songs I like. And yet, when I stare at the track list, I find myself weirdly struggling to say much about most of them. I do quite like the silly "Lawnmower" for instance, which taps into the banality of what goes into having a lawn that will make other people take notice (I laugh in the part where the girlfriend from Andover packs up the Land Rover and tells him it's either her or the lawnmower), and which uses repetition in a way that amusingly depicts the back-and-forth, back-and-forth nature of pushing a lawnmower. "Left Out in the Cold" has a low-key danceable aspect to it that feels like it would have fit in well on FFS, and the lyrics (which center around somebody sent to Winnipeg to their job for ... some reason) are eyebrow-raising at the least. "Onomata Pia" is a fun jaunty bit of electro-music-hall, "iPhone" has a fascinating mixture of guitars and keyboards that builds a feeling of emotional danger before each chorus strikes with "Put your fucking iPhone down and listen to me ..." and ... and ...