Graham Parker - Squeezing Out Sparks
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Graham ParkerEdition: Music CD
Format: Extra tracks, Import, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2001-07-09
Music Label: Polygram UK
Soundtracks:
- Discovering Japan
- Local Girls
- Nobody Hurts You
- You Can't Be Too Strong
- Passion Is No Ordinary Word
- Saturday Nite Is Dead
- Love Gets You Twisted
- Protection
- Waiting For The UFOs
- Don't Get Excited
- Mercury Poisoning
- I Want You Back
Free Music Notes for Squeezing Out Sparks
Free Music Review: Sparks create explosions
Hit: 5 Stars
This is both Graham Parker's best album and a high point of the late seventies. After three exceptional albums of pub-rock and northern R'n'B inflected rock that failed to detonate commercially, Parker took the Rumour and his new work to Arista Records and set out on what he knew was make or break. He'd already seen Elvis Costello make commercial inroads with some of the same concepts he'd been exploring back on Heat Treatment and Howlin' Wind, yet - according to the revealing liner notes - The Rumour was failing to catch fire on the new material until producer Jack Nitzsche told them to get serious and play the songs for what they were.
The result was an album of such brute force that Parker has yet to best it, and it became his breakthrough in the year of Armed Forces and Look Sharp!. Fed by genuine anger and the energy of the ascending New Wave, the songs on "Squeezing Out Sparks" burn everything from Hiroshima ("Discovering Japan"), the drug-infested bar scene and the wanna-be hipsters crawling through it ("Saturday Night Is Dead") to abortion in all its contradictory facets ("You Can't Be Too Strong").
Parker also courses with anger on this album. His disdain for his lack of perceived deserved success doubles as the fuel for such wounded love songs as "Passion Is No Ordinary Word" and "Nobody Hurts You." At one point, he gets so fed up that he longs for the aliens to just get him the heck offa this planet ("Waiting for The UFO's," or as Parker pronounced them "You-foes"). He and the Rumour coated all of these songs with spiky hooks and inventive playing (the twisted riffing on "Japan" in particular), making all of these songs sing-along ready. "Local Girls" even became something of a radio hit, one of the rare moments that radio embraced Parker's music.
The extra two songs are "I Want You back/Mercury Poisoning" (which was available as a bonus 45 with the original LP). Remember about that anger? In "Mercury Poisoning," Parker takes an unsheathed shot at his former label, sneering "I've got a dinosaur for a representative; it's got a small brain and refuses to learn." It's a classic punk rock moment, on a par with the Pistol's "EMI."
Great stuff all around. While Graham Parker has made several more albums in the years following "Sparks" (recommended are The Real Macaw, Steady Nerves and the recent Don't Tell Columbus), he began to slowly mellow his music into an almost folk-rock articulacy. As a document of the kind of sea-change that occurred as the 80's kicked in, "Squeezing Out Sparks" is indispensable.
Squeezing Out Sparks Poster
Remastered reissue of 1979 release. 12 tracks in all featuring the bonus tracks 'Mercury Poisoning' & 'I Want You Back'. Mercury Records.Alternative Rock Music CDs
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