Daily Telegraph, album of the weekd

The best of this week’s new releases Sparks Hello Young Lovers Gut Records, £11.99 Three years since they said “goodbye to the beat” on their extraordinary Lil’ Beethoven album, Californian brothers Ron and Russell Mael have emerged, blinking, from another epic spell in their studio with this equally strange and beautiful disc. Sparks: ‘owe much to contemporary classical composers’ Because this new collection in many ways follows in the eccentric footsteps of its predecessor, it inevitably lacks some of that album’s impact, its shock-of-the-newness, the sense that it was year zero for Sparks and that they had torn up the rulebook and started again. That doesn’t mean, however, that Hello Young Lovers is any less good. It’s extraordinary. How long must singer Russell Mael have spent in front of the microphone, recording what sometimes sound like hundreds of vocal tracks, to create such a rich, textured sound? What malevolent psyche cooked up such nuggets of weirdness as (Baby Baby) Can I Invade Your Country (“I need the enjoyment of rapid deployment”)? At a time when most bands of their generation have either signed up for the nostalgia circuit or retired to run antiques shops in Norfolk, Sparks are making the most radical, the most out-there and the most memorable music of their 20-album, 30-odd-year career. If your last experience of Sparks was of their big, ringing ’70s commercial breakthrough This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us, or of fun tunes from their hi-nrg period such as When I Kiss You (I Hear Charlie Parker Playin’), it’s best to explain where they are now coming from. They no longer make music that could be described as “rock” or “dance”; their oeuvre, with its emphasis on repetition and layering and linear structure, and its use of strings and synthesizers and piano, owes as much to contemporary classical composers such as Philip Glass as it does to the pop charts. It’s still, however, wholly listenable, often very funny, and mostly (with the exception of the overblown closing track) very beautiful. Perfume is sweet and melodic; Waterproof sees them cast off their cloak of irony to produce something uplifting, moving. And on the most sensational track, There’s No Such Thing as Aliens, the title phrase repeats and builds to devastating, head-spinning, operatic effect. It’s sensational. Right now, no one else in the world is making music like this. David Cheal