Sparks- The Girl is Crying in her Latte
(album 2023) Sparks may have been
around forever but that doesn’t mean they are trading on old glories like the
handful of their contemporaries still out there. This is their twenty fifth studio album yet it sounds like the work of a vital, much younger group still
pushing those envelopes around. People used to wonder why Sparks had never
become mega successful but that has been to their advantage enabling both an
independence and longevity other artists would love to achieve. They’ve had
their moments in the commercial Sun of course- the imperial run of three albums
in the 1970s, their dramatic move into dance music at the end of that decade,
their groundbreaking `Lil Beethoven` album and more recently acclaim for recent
albums, a documentary and a film. Yet Russell and Ron Mael, both in their
seventies now, are not for dwelling on even the recent past and sure enough
this new collection moves on from the richer sounds of 2020’s `A Steady Drip,
Drip, Drip` being much more electronic and bleepy than you’d expect. On the
other hand that is so them, shifting direction again.
