Search - Sparks :: Introducing Sparks (Russell Sleeve)

Introducing Sparks, originally released in 1977, is the seventh album by Sparks and the only one of their 20 long-players not available on CD. Until now--the duo's own label, Lil' Beethoven Records, are putting it out. Finally, you can hear the much-discussed but rarely heard transitional album from Ron and Russell Mael's near-40-year career.
David Bowie wasn't the only chameleonic figure in '70s rock. Introducing Sparks finds the Mael brothers, in the company of an array of top session musicians (mirroring Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan in this respect), caught between the innovative glam-prog-pop of their four early-to-mid-'70s Island albums (Kimono My House, Propaganda, Indiscreet, Big Beat) and the audacious proto-electro of their 1979 collaboration with Giorgio Moroder (No. 1 in Heaven).
Introducing Sparks was their first and only album for Columbia, who pushed the boat out at the time by releasing it on red vinyl. They also spared no expense when it came to the recording, allowing or perhaps encouraging Ron and Russell to engage the cream of LA's backing singers and session guns for hire. Just as the front and back cover of the album presents our heroes as faux matinee idols, all soft-focus and airbrushed perfection, so Introducing Sparks has a polished, slick, sophisticated, big-budget sound that reflects the record company's desire to get the Maels' music on the radio.
Heard today, Introducing Sparks sounds less like made-for-heavy-rotation AOR and more like a comment on, or rather series of pastiches of (all right, then: acerbic attacks on) daytime US radio-fodder: imagine Randy Newman as program controller in charge of America's airwaves for some idea of this satirical yet highly commercial meta-rock.