Album: Sparks

Lil' Beethoven, Republic

Sparks' last album, 2000's perky Balls, was the kind of tongue-in-cheek, disco-friendly glam-techno crossover that, two years on, would probably cruise quite neatly in the wake of "electro-clash" retro-bates Fischer-Spooner. With typical bad timing, for this follow-up Ron and Russell Mael have ditched the whole techno thing in favour of jokey pseudo-classical stylings that recall the more amusing corners of Queen's back catalogue. Humour is clearly the prerequisite in these tracks: some, like "How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?" (answer: "Practice, man, practice!") and "I Married Myself" ("I'm very happy together") are simply one-liners built into symphonic pop trifles. Others have a more satiric bent, using sub-operatic pomp to deflate such contemporary cultural staples as Ibiza ravers ("The Rhythm Thief"), gold-diggers ("Ugly Guys with Beautiful Girls") and middle-class hip-hoppers ("Suburban Homeboy"). Most pointed, perhaps, is "What are all These Bands so Angry About?", a double-edged dig at the proliferation of careerist journeymen clogging up the airwaves and obscuring the truly creative: "Some might have done it, but not today/ Beethoven, Coltrane or Lady Day/ Some might have done it, broken on through/ Wagner, Tina or Howlin' Wolf." Mostly, the arrangements involve energetic piano ostinatos, declamatory tympani and grandiose orchestrations fronted by multi-tracked banks of Russell Mael's vocals, a potentially enervating style which is most interesting on "Your Call's Very Important to Us. Please Hold.", where the interlocking layers of vocals assume the aspect of a Steve Reich vocal cut-up.