[color=red][b]Sparks' "Hello Young Lovers" is music that lives outside categories, free from genre[/b][/color]


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[size=2][b]Ron and Russell Mael present Hello Young Lovers, their 20th album. To achieve such enormity and expansiveness Ron and Russell worked in a limitless vacuum for the best part of 18 months. The only inspiration taken from any current music was the provocation to go as far as possible in the opposite direction. When writing and recording their previous album Lil Beethoven, Sparks broke the rules, but in creating Hello Young Lovers the rule book has been thrown away. 
      
1 Dick Around 6:35 
2 Perfume 4:59 
3 The Very Next Fight 5:18 
4 (Baby, Baby) Can I Invade Your Country Key, 5:56 
5 Rock, Rock, Rock 5:10 
6 Metaphor 4:03 
7 Waterproof 4:17 
8 Here Kitty 4:26 
9 There's No Such Thing as Aliens 2:53 
10 As I Sit Down to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral 7:02

[i]2006 (Gut Records)[/i]


[quote=some]How we got here, I do not know. But Sparks has brought us to a place that no one has ever been. Their seeming obsessive penchant for exhaustive variations -- sometimes mistaken as simple repetition by some listeners -- would take a full course in musicology to understand. Especially here, where countless influences and forms are referenced and subsequently transformed into sheer capital "M" Music by the Mael brothers. In a post "Lil' Beethoven" world, where music fans seek little more than comfort and solace, we listeners can't even begin to categorize what's going on here. And there's really no need to try. "Hello Young Lovers" is music complete and unto itself. It is the latest battle won in the long war against cliche. 

The lyrics are darker, more pointed, funny in a "gee, that hurts" way. And the pieces themselves are literally without precedent. Just a few moments with "Here Kitty" will expose you to the only extant example of a single piece of music that includes some shaded swing inflections, a burst of musique concret and a string passage easily worthy of Haydn. This ain't no collage: this is a perfectly constructed piece, without a hint of the irrelevant or nonessential. We really are somewhere else. The song form, dating back to early renaissance madrigals, has rarely taken such a nearly incomprehensible leap forward. While popular musics in general continue to dabble in the smallest possible degrees of market-safe variation-on-the-familiar, Sparks has simply jumped ahead, over, out, up, you name it. They are out front and all alone. This isn't funny anymore -- this is so good it's scary. 

"Hello Young Lovers" is music that lives outside categories, free from genre. 

And what matters more is that, for thirty plus years, Sparks has consistently refused the easy road. While they've perfected existing forms and originated others, they have flat out refused to repeat their own formulas or to wallow in that most prized trough of the music industry: predictability. Instead, Sparks keeps teasing, stretching, pulling, pushing, tearing, inventing and astonishing. But never bending. [/quote]


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