Hello Young Lovers

We Say...

Review by Michael Azerrad

Sparks sound like they were abducted during their mid-'70s glam-pop heyday, locked in a closet for 30 years and then made to guess what music sounds like now. On Hello Young Lovers, they get it wonderfully wrong. It's highly wrought, rarefied, idiosyncratic stuff, art-pop made by effete aesthetes, and it makes for some freakish creations replete with gear-stripping tempo shifts, sucker-whomping guitar riffage, orchestral maneuvers in the blinding light and arch, erudite wit more deadpan than keyboardist Ron Mael's thousand-yard glare. Campy, theatrical and over-the-top in a way barely anyone attempts anymore, it's unashamed of the grand gesture — in fact, the grand gesture is Sparks' metiér, their forte, their raison d'être, and several other French words.

The band's previous album, 2003's Li'l Beethoven, inaugurated the minimalist epoch in Sparks' sprawling timeline, cladding their foppish poperettas in panes of Philip Glass. Hello Young Lovers, the Mael brothers' 20th studio album, melds that approach with just about every pose the band has struck in its 35-year rollercoaster of a career: synth-pop, disco, new wave, glam, all cloaked in Gilbert & Sullivanesque pomp and circumstance, as in the doubly entendre'd techno-anthem "(Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country," a wicked parody of "The Star-Spangled Banner" featuring such debonair drollery as "I need the enjoyment of rapid deployment." Finally, an anti-war song even Donald Rumsfeld could love.

Hello Young Lovers celebrates the single-minded force of the obsessive, exploding the mundane into the gloriously overblown, Seinfeldian songs about nothing as produced by Cecil B. DeMille. Opener "Dick Around" might ostensibly be an ode to wasting time, and yet it's as ambitious and labor-intensive as building an Eiffel Tower out of Lego blocks, an astute metaphor for the elaborate lengths one goes to in order not to do anything. When boy-voiced singer Russell Mael's meticulously stacked mock-operatic harmonies suddenly give way to a tautly strutting pomp-metal interlude, the frustration suddenly become fist-poundingly palpable.

Speaking of metaphor, "Metaphor" supplies a useful disquisition thereon: "Use them wisely, use them well," Russell advises, "and you'll never know the hell of loneliness." Then he gets all meta on "Rock, Rock, Rock," a disquisition on the art of pop songcraft: "Soft passages can get you into trouble," Russell sagely warns, only to break down and plead "I promise that I'll rock, rock, rock/ Don't leave me!" over staccato strings, plinking piano and martial timpani, in a quasi-classical mise-en-scène that recalls the Pet Shop Boys' insouciant melodrama. Perhaps there is nothing else one needs to say about the flamboyantly rococo finale, "As I Sit to Play the Organ at Notre Dame Cathedral," with its infectiously imbecilic ascending keyboard hook, than to note that it includes a "hallelujah" chorus.

The problem is, to quote noted singer-guitarist David St. Hubbins, it's such a thin line between stupid and clever. When Sparks fall, they fall very flat, ruining the spell. Two early, consecutive duds — the uneventful "The Very Next Fight" and the mechanical Billy Idol swing of "Perfume," with its monotone litanies of dolls and scents — very nearly torpedo the whole album. So these precocious fiftysomethings might not score every time, but if you're the type of person who digs Björk (who's a big Sparks fan, by the way), try this out. Everyone else steer clear. Because you probably can't handle it.