Jerk Music Critic: Sparks, A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

The pandemic turned everything upside down: besides face masks and Zoom mutes, Sparks was back on the charts in what feels like the first time in decades. There's even a movie out about them. Did greater America finally rediscover these two after all those years quietly keeping their corner of L.A. weird? Twenty-four albums and fifty years later Russ Mael's range is down a storey or six and Ron's glasses are a bit thicker, but the production's better than ever and the wit still doesn't quit, and they've wisely moved away from their less approachable chamber music days to something, yes, closer to their last chart success of the 1980s. That doesn't mean they've gotten artistically lazy, mind you: "Lawnmower" feels like a zippier earworm version of "Suburban Homeboy" in all the right ways, I like the splash of insincerity in "All That" and the thinly disguised indictment of modern disinformation in "Nothing Travels Faster Than the Speed of Light," and solid pop grooves keep it moving like "Left Out in the Cold" and "One for the Ages." Not everything fires on all cylinders, such as the lurching beat and opaque lyrics of "Sainthood Is Not In Your Future," and "Stravinsky's Only Hit" is high-quality but hard to follow, while their other attempts at topicality ("iPhone" and closer "Please Don't F--k Up My World") are a bit too hamfisted to fully enjoy. Stiil, they make up for it with other entrancing tracks like "Self-Effacing," a wacky anthem of the excessively modest (lyrical highlights: "I'm not the guy who says 'I'm the guy'" and "Thank you but Autotune has been used/used and perhaps a trifle abused"), fabulous humour-infested throwbacks to their zany 70s output in "Onomato Pia" and "The Existential Threat" (a prescient COVID commentary?) and my favourite "Pacific Standard Time," a luxurious buffet for the ears that simultaneously mocks and celebrates the superficiality of southern California in devilish equal measure. Meanwhile, they're recording another album and they're actually going to tour in 2022. I, for one, blame the Delta variant. (Content: F-bombs in "iPhone" and obviously "Please Don't F--k Up My World.")

🌟🌟🌟🌟

Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟🌟
A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

🌟🌟🌟
Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

🌟🌟
Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

🌟
Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

💩
How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.