ALBUM OF THE MONTH
A short review this month – and, apologies, I’m a bit late I know. After a busy month on the go, juggling different priorities, travelling quite a bit – and not having the luxury of time to sit still for long – July’s ‘Album of the Month’ actually picked me. It rose to the top when I was at work, travelling between meetings, snoozing on the late train home, whilst cooking a lasagne on a Sunday and during those weekend road trips with loved ones. Home and away, ‘Mad’ has been my soundtrack for the last month and, in a way, it is fast becoming my musical companion of summer 2025.
Sparks is a band I knew about, forgot about and then was re-introduced to when I watched their absorbing set at Glastonbury a few summers ago. Following that, I watched the film documentary to fill in the many gaps on what I had missed from their story. As a rocker, pop and synth-pop isn’t really my cup of Darjeeling, but every now and then artists come along that make a nonsense of music genres – the neat genre silos constructed by the marketing people to put us, the fans, in boxes that are easy to sell to. In truth music is borderless – the genre word is not needed and for me Sparks, like Bowie, are so richly creative, they kind of make their own oeuvre – and the music world is better for it.
When ‘Mad’ landed it was the first time for years I felt suitably acquainted with Sparks music to welcome the new songs with a sense of familiarity and excitement – having grown particularly fond of ‘Hello Young Lovers’ and their nineteenth studio album ‘Lil’ Beethoven’ over the previous year.
Their fine new album immediately resonated but the excitement when listening to a Sparks album for the first time is they always seem to re-invent themselves and surprise the listener. For me, ‘Mad’ represented yet another lens through which to enjoy the band’s art. The satire was there, the absorbing lyrics, but the sound had more of a band feel through the bass, guitar and drums. Welcome news for a rocker.
Seeing the band live at Hammersmith Odeon in June, everything clicked. The show was phenominal and the intensity – the feeling – of audience love for the band is something I’ve not experienced at the same level for some years. During the set, Sparks played half a dozen songs from ‘Mad’, far more than the light sprinkling of new material bands often add to their sets when they’re promoting an album. Live in concert, the backline – the band feel – to the new songs really rocked and somehow the drama of the live set and freshness of the album recordings cross-fertilised. The new songs added a dimension to the set and the spirit from the live performances somehow reinforced subsequent interest in the album material. For me, this hasn’t happened that often but, for summer 2025, I see the Speaks album and my lasting memories from their London show as two sides of the same coin. It’s probably also a reason why the album has been my friend for much for the summer so far.
I’m not going to do my usual track-by-track; frankly that feels redundant on this occasion. The reason here is simply because my relationship with this release is as an album, a body of work. For weeks I just put the disc on and played it. For a while, I didn’t really know what the songs were called, and it didn’t matter. The album is a journey, like a good movie. There area rich variety of colours and moods; singalong moments and time to reflect. Moments of satire and then of curiosity when it seems there is more to a song than you might enjoy at face value. This is what makes the music as art so absorbing. Like going to an art gallery in London and looking at a painting: See it at different times of day and you can see different things in it. And depending on your own mood, you might explore it in different ways. In the age of commoditised music and ‘tunes’, the all-absorbing sense of adventure and discovery from a new Sparks album is so refreshing.
There’s plenty of fun and involved moments and full-band drama on the album. My favouritesongs have become ‘Downed In A Sea Of Tears’ and also ‘My Devotion’ – which fells like a distant cousin to their show-closing anthem ‘All That.’ And, as far as earworms go, ‘Running Up A Tab At The Hotel For The Fab’ is one of those singalongs you just can’t help but singalong to whenever it comes on.
After a 10-year journey chronicling and promoting the rise of a new generation of artists, largely in the rock genre, it is very apparent today that so many artists are chasing the algorithms, the likes and sometimes the chase for numbers results in music changing to become easier to like. Too often in today’s music world, the originality – the bravery – of the music seems to end up coming second. To me, this is why Sparks matter so much – and perhaps more today than ever before. They do their music on their terms, they create their own genre, and they have outlived music fashions. Emulated by some and – as creative trailblazers – influencers to so many, the Sparks sound and persona is uniquely their own. Many decades and 25 studio albums on from their debut, Sparks can still drop an album of such freshness that makes everything around it seem quite tired, predictable and grey.
Discover the world of Sparks and their new album at https://allsparks.com
