Review Summary: A look into the future from 40 years ago that still feels and sounds like little else.
To me, this is the album that perfectly represents everything Sparks have ever stood for. While some (read: I) might think Kimono My House and Propaganda kinda dilute that spirit by immersing it in glam and indulging fully in Russell Mael's falsetto, this album puts their intellectual brattiness and general bat*** insanity up on a pedestal. It is regretfully imperfect (Biology 2 is not quite up to the par of the rest of the album, even if it's still wonderful, hiding a heartbreaking melody underneath its sped up Zappa silliness) but it is still one of my personal favourite albums of all time, and it's by far the weirdest album they ever did. Some of these songs feel almost like deconstructions of pop (like Slowboat, which is almost laidback AOR with hilarious new-wave keyboards slapped on top of it, yet still being beautiful due to lead vocalist Russell's whispery scat vocals) while the rest spend their time, well, predicting every damn musical revolution that came after it. Fa La Fa Lee feels exactly like The Cars and Devo and all them people without using ANY synths (but boy does it sound like it) and yet it feels much more awesome than nearly everything those bands came up with: lyrics that describe wanting to *** your sister, for one, as well as all sorts of silly sonic touches being placed everywhere (like this distorted sound that pops in and out of the right ear, sounds like a synth trying to be a guitar trying to be a synth) and some subtle sonic jokes - like that baseball motif (DAHDAHDAHDAH DAH DAH! You know the one) being played in the middle of the bridge. In a song about ***ing your sister. Yeah.
And this kind of insane cleverness goes on for essentially the whole album, with interesting percussion (pots/pans on Roger, cardboard boxes on Wonder Girl), unorthodox instrumentation (Saccharin And The War has a squeeze-toy section) and odd vocal tricks, like the backup vocals which are mixed so oddly they sound like they've been distorted and played backwards. The centerpiece of the album, though, is definitely Fletcher Honorama, a chilling, enrapturing and trippy ballad with some of Russell's best, creepiest vocals (double-tracked!) and a creepy piano solo that slowwwllly fades out before startlingly going DUN DUN DUN loudly in your face, in jumpy stereo. Todd Rundgren's production work for this album, responsible for a lot of the idiosyncracy, is awesome. Full of interesting jumping panning effects and odd distortions and everything. It's difficult to describe, but it makes the album so much more immersive and fun to listen to.
And these lyrics! I've already mentioned Fa La Fa Lee ("She thinks only of the higher parts of me / Such a shame, were I she / I'd set my sights much lower then I'd sing fa la fa lee / But as it stands now that would be a felony"), but then there's the comically pretentious Simple Ballet which seems to mock PR guys getting overexcited and overselling everything, even if it's really stupid ("There'll be long shots, there'll be close shots, there'll be mid-shots / Simple ballet was an idea, then a novel, next a movie, soon on TV"), and Big Bands, about a guy who's CRIPPLINGLY obsessed with big band jazz ("See my large collection, some on loan / Of every big band record ever made /I had to sell my heater, so don't shake / I smile like Herbert Hoover when the big bands play" after which it bursts into fast-paced pseudo-rap b/w German new-wave music). All the songs follow this trend of funny, literate lyrics (though Biology 2's science puns ARE kind of corny) and many of them have no precedent in pop music (that I'm aware of) and make one wonder where one would even think to write such things.
So yeah, get this album sometime. It might be the most influential album that pretty much no one heard. Some of its initial wow factor MAY be lost just cause so many bands afterwards copied the living hell out of it, but when you think that this was made in goddamn 1971 it's pretty impressive to say the least. After a while, though, its brilliant complexity, near-claustrophobically ideapacked arrangement/writing/production and piles of unforgettable hooks will take over you. I'd go so far as to say this is the second most important early "underground" album next to The Velvet Underground & Nico (though that album was eventually knighted beyond belief while this one remained cult). A genuinely underrated masterpiece by a band full of genuinely underrated masterpieces.
