Sparks @ UCLA, Royce Hall 2/14/09

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L-R Steven MacDonald, Steven Nistor, Ron Mael, Russell Mael, Jim Wilson, Marcus Blake. Photo by godscomic via Flickr/Used with permission

At the near-forty-year mark in their career, the bro-team of Ron and Russell Mael are finally receiving the kind of success that occasionally visits extremely unique musicians who hang in there for the long haul. Even if their music is so out-there as to only appeal to 1% of the listening audience, there’s a new potential audience every year as another crop of rock and roll kids sets out on their path to discovery, and the ones inclined to bizarre postmodern pop will eventually cross their path. Over time, those small numbers add up. So it was that Sparks sold out Royce Hall on Saturday by combining new and vintage material for a show that brought out the faithful in droves.

This was not a greatest-hits excursion, they don’t really do that sort of thing anymore. As per their new tradition, they opened the show with the entirety of their latest album, Exotic Creatures Of The Deep. In addition to a full band (drummer Steven Nistor, Mother Superior guitarists Jim Wilson and Marcus Blake, and bassist Steven McDonald from Redd Kross), the Maels made use of a female dance troupe and big-screen animations to add a visual dimension to the songs. Overt stage production like this is easy to overplay, but they knew when to pull out all the stops and when to pull back, and it was some of the most effective staging I’ve ever seen at a rock show. The dancers were terrific, particularly while waddling around in Ron Mael moustaches and ties during She Got Me Pregnant. There’s clearly a theater major in this band, one who probably dreamed of staging his own stuff at a sold-out Royce Hall while attending UCLA in the late sixties.

Despite the unfamiliarity of the new material, the crowd of devotees ate it up, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Of all their recent releases, this one is perhaps the closest stylistically to the mid-seventies albums that remain their most revered. It’s “accessible” to the weirdos who liked them in the first place - more so than the forays into disco and new wave that produced their biggest US hits - and with muscular guitars surging behind the elaborate synth and vocal weavings, it sounded great. Some of the arrangements were clearly pre-recorded, as Ron acknowledged when he stepped away from the keyboard to watch the animation of a chimp in a tuxedo wailing away on a piano for the entirety of Let The Monkey Drive (one of several Valentines-appropriate themes that evening, about a couple so anxious to start their romantic holiday while tooling down PCH, they decide to do what the title says.) Later, on Photoshop Me Out Of Your Life, he appeared to be playing a piano on the screen, struggling to keep up as the image was continually stretched, centered, re-colored and otherwise manipulated by an unseen (evil?) hand controlling the universe via mouse clicks.

But the band, especially lead guitarist Wilson, added flesh and blood to the proceedings, driving Strange Animal to a thrashing intensity at its finish. The last time I saw Blake and Wilson, they were chainsawing their way through the early Black Flag repertoire behind Henry Rollins, Keith Morris and Chuck Dukowski at a series of benefits for the West Memphis Three, tied in with Rollins’ Rise Above Flag tribute album. While Sparks and Black Flag might seem as far apart on the “rock” continuum as you can get, they both require high adrenaline and the ability to pull tight, and these guys are up to the job. For his part, Steve McDonald looked to be in heaven, playing the gig he’s probably dreamed about being part of since he was twelve, while session drummer Nistor (Daniel Lanois, Gnarls Barkley) did a remarkable job keeping the whole thing swinging and alive while locked in time with the tapes.

After climaxing the Exotic Creatures set by ritualistically burning each of their previous album covers on the big screen, there was a brief intermission, at which the most commonly overheard remark was something to the effect of, “I wasn’t expecting that to be so good!” Expectations for the second set, however, were another story. Kimono My House, released in 1974, is widely looked upon as the cornerstone of the band’s career, and for good reason. Along with its followup Propaganda, it crystallizes the group’s appeal in a little more than half an hour: dense, hilarious lyrics, recited in breathless falsetto on top of a gnarly rock band that sounds too vicious for its sugar-coated tunes. It still sounds utterly unlike anything else ever produced by them or anyone.

For this portion of the show, the big screen and tape machines were stashed away, and we got a set that must have looked and sounded about like it did thirty-five years ago. From the gunshot that kickstarts This Town’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, they’re off in high gear, and the audience is bouncing off their seat cushions. Russell’s voice has held up amazingly well, and he still hits those way-up-high notes without missing a syllable. And the band has nailed the spirit of the thing, jaunty like Gilbert and Sullivan, with a thick bottom end and a hint of distortion on the filigree. It’s simply fantastic, and every song receives a genuinely grateful round of cheers and hollers. Those who came stag to a Valentine’s show can comfort themselves with the bombastic waltz of Falling In Love With Myself Again, or be glad they’re not the jilted Romeo who sings Here In Heaven to his girlfriend that chickened out of their suicide pact ("Juliet, I thought we had agreed/ Now I know why you let me take the lead"), while the happy couples can gaze into each others’ eyes and sing “Thank God it’s not Christmas, and there’s just you to do.”

Part of the thrill is the fact that such an event is even taking place in LA; since the band has been so prolific in recent years, they haven’t paid that much attention to their back catalog when they’ve bothered to play shows at all, and those of us who came late to the party never imagined we’d get to hear Russell utter the immortal line “You mentioned Kant and I was shocked, so shocked/ You know where I come from none of the girls have such foul tongues” in person without having to travel to London. (The band has performed Kimono My House there twice since 2004, including one night of a three-week run in which they played all twenty-one of their albums, and is going back in March to do it again.) After the final chorus of Equator trails off, the crowd rises to its feet fot a good ten minutes and cheers like it’s the old days, geniune rhythmic clapping and foot stomping and “WE-WANT-MORE!” action that LA crowds so rarely give, another pleasant throwback to the past.

The encore draws from each of their distinctive periods - Propaganda’s title track, At Home At Work At Play and BC; the KROQ 80s nugget Mickey Mouse (though they completely ignore their biggest singles of that time, I Predict and Cool Places); the Giorgio Moroder-produced No. 1 Song In Heaven; and even their post-millennial resurgence, with the amazing Dick Around getting the most sweaty, metallic performance of the night, and closing out with a full-house singalong on Suburban Homeboy (“…and I say ‘Yo Dawg!’ to my pool cleaning guy.”) By the time they finish up to massive applause, almost three hours after they started, Russell looks genuinely overjoyed. Ron looks about the same. But you wouldn’t want to see him any other way. Ron Mael’s dour visage has been the one predictable thing about Sparks since they began, why mess with it?