Remastered reissue of 1979 release. 12 tracks in all featuring the bonus tracks 'Mercury Poisoning' & 'I Want You Back'. Mercury Records.
CD Reviews
This guy is incredible!
Corky | 09/12/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"He was the angry young man before Costello even started. With Brinsley Scwartz (a Pub rock band that Nick Lowe use to be in) doing the music and Graham Parker singing made a perfect combination. Most of the critics back then named it one of the best albums of the decade and if you hear it you'll know why. I do like his first two albums Heat Treatment and Howlin' Wind better myself since they have more of a gritty soulful swing like Van Morrison unlike this album is rock but what he does better on this album is the songwriting he is at his peak on this album."
Girls.... want to understand male anger?
Chas | Planet Eartsnop | 06/12/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"we can get , like really sensitive, passionate and vulnerable too...
Plus we're smarter than we look and act...
This album is a masterpiece, lyrically, and with the backing band, the Rumor at its Zenith, with incredible bass/drums/lead riffs .... *****
"Its not the knife in the heart that tears you apart ....
Its just the tought of someone sticking it in ...."
; )
"
Sparks: timeless classic
chris d. ramsey | Denver, CO USA | 12/14/2001
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I bought this record back in 1979, when I was a freshman at Colorado State University. I needed to get the remastered version on CD. I did... And by the way kids, this is MUSIC!
So you youngsters out there will thank me for weeks if you buy this classic from the punk era. As far as you could tell, this could have been recorded last week. It's timeless.The two bonus tracks were cut during the original sessions, but were left off of the original album. Buried for 22 years these two songs are as great sounding as anything on the record."
Sparks create explosions
Tim Brough | Springfield, PA United States | 04/03/2008
(5 out of 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."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1