DVD review 9/10 in Spanish mag

SPARKS “LIL’ BEETHOVEN: LIVE IN STOCKHOLM” by ALBERTO DIAZ (POPULAR1 MAGAZINE, SPAIN) It’s a pleasure to verify how Sparks continue to be as inspired as the good old times. More than thirty years in music and they are still reinventing themselves, playing with all kinds of styles and becoming unique cult figures separate from everything that’s predictable. “Lil’ Beethoven” (2002), their most recent studio work is a fine example of that eagerness of extreme artistic evolution and “Lil’ Beethoven: Live in Stockholm”, their brand new released DVD, turns out to be the perfect visual document to understand definitively their fantastic Opera-Pop of the New Millennium. Recorded March of 2004 in Södra Teatern of Stockholm, this spectacular DVD is a lucid vision of Sparks’ recent tour, in which the Mael brothers clearly show that they are still a completely refreshing bet, highly amusing and unpredictable. Sparks at their maximum splendour – astonishing in a performance divided in two acts: first act is made up of the nine compositions of “Lil’ Beethoven”, and a second comprised different ‘hits’ from their never ending discography. Whereas the final section of oldies is a true celebration, with classics of the stature of “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us”, “Nothing To Do”, “Hospitality On Parade”, “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way'”, “Amateur Hour” or the dark “National Crime Awareness Week” (it’s amazing to know some of these songs already are thirty years old as they continue to sound so fresh), we must emphasize the first part of the set is the most surprising and recommendable passage of the ‘Sparks experience’. The live representation of the magnificent pieces that compose “Lil’ Beethoven”, like small musical sketches telling stories of impossible love, suburban colleagues and megalomaniac star wannabes, is one of the most attractive things to see in the pop-rock concerts panorama of the last years. With a grandiloquent and hypnotic musical base and a visual support that mixes naive technology with numbers well inspired by geniuses like Groucho, Tati or the Python, the Mael Bros astonish with powerful and theatrical items as magnificent as shaped in “How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall”, “What Are All These Bands So Angry About”, “I Married Myself” or the seductive “My Baby’s Taking Me Home”, demonstrating that, after all this time, they still have many things to say without repeating schemes, being so magnificent, eccentric and surrealist as always. A true celebration. Lights out, Ibiza. *ALBERTO DIAZ (9 out of 10) (this is a translation from the Spanish text)