Sparks continue toying with creative flourishes on MAD!

Ron and Russell Mael are not ones to remain staid or immovable, the stock idiosyncratic label often assigned to the sibling duo appears trite when reflecting on a legacy pioneering and redefining genres from the peripheries. Career peaks Kimino My House’s “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For the Both of Us” and Giorgio Moroder-produced No. 1 in Heaven signposting early 70s UK breakthrough success to later popularity on the continent for the pair. Both records would usher in respective standards for avant-rock and synth-pop, bookends to a decade that secured the pair’s generation-hopping influence, faithfully captured on Edgar Wright-helmed docufilm The Sparks Brothers.

Marking a move from Island to Transgressive records, MAD! represents the pair’s 28^th notch in a prolific recording journey, following the immediacy of The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte, which read as a further declaration of innovative intent. An equal urge to confound is still clear a few seconds in, opener "Do Things My Own Way" perhaps too easily confineable to the duo's convention-shunning shenanigans, envisaging the infamously reclusive Howard Hughes “In Jordan twos / Gonna do things my own way”. Sparks from the outset find form through such familiar twin pivots of wry humour and self-awareness, whilst in this instance circling back to their Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins-era Sinatra send-up.

The LA-born pair’s versatility finds space to breathe via the operatic scale of "I-405 Rules", an ode to their native city whilst referencing the global reach of their career: “And the Allegheny, Nile, and the Rhine in Deutschland / And all of them are beautiful but 405’s a 10”. A track very much seated in the current zeitgeist, in the wake of the forest fires that swept California last year, and one that nudgingly defies any notion of Sparks as abstract and distanced. “JanSport Backpack” proves an unlikely marketing jingle for the vintage apparel brand, whilst "Hit Me Baby" leans into a heavier stripped-down Big Beat-era sound – Russell's distinct falsetto range twinned with hard rock riffs in a jolt from the usual baroque blue.

"A Long Red Light" leads with ricocheting ELO-steered synth and keys in a throwback to hybrid 70s power pop and glam intonations, "Drowned in a Sea of Tears" switching equally between the pair's early to mid 80s electro pop phase and more recent directions. Dependably defeating expectation, “A Little Bit of Light Banter" begins as a jaunty slice of art rock before evolving into layered Beatlesque chamber pop, nodding to the pair’s formative creative influences from this side of the pond.

Just shy of fifty years separated Sparks’ Todd Rundgren-produced debut and a 2021 film adaption of the pair’s operatic score Annette, with the same daring imprint uniting both projects. In an act of revisiting origins and relacquering their sound with each new release, MAD! conforms to what’s expected in its own off-kilter idiom, insomuch as any Sparks album can be reasonably defined. The angular flexes in style and wordplay tied together with Russell’s high wire deployment prove as duly consistent a formula as any of the standout entries in the duo’s crowded discography.