Alright alright alriiiiight! I’m sure you missed these reviews! I know I did. I love writing album reviews for other publications, but it means I have to take on a slightly more formal voice to do so. I don’t keep a journal consistently, but I’ve been blogging for 10 years, and one of these days I’ll pick a random review and try to guess what I was sad or mad about. So I can’t think of a better band to be cryptically depressed with than The Sparklers. 10 years of Adobe & Teardrops, probably a literal 1.5 million songs listened to, thousands of album reviews, and I can say confidently that The Sparklers are one of the best to ever do it.
Crying at the Low Bar is one of my all-time favorite Adobe & Teardrops albums, and you can read that review here, though the post doesn’t seem to have fully transferred from Blogger. Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites.
The band’s latest release, Miss Philadelphia, is as much a directive as it is a series of character sketches of the down and out in South Philly. Where the band’s previous album, All The Prettiest Girls Go to Hell, captured a fiery Uncle Tupelo country-rock energy, Miss Philadelphia feels like the happy medium between that fury and the dry despondency of Crying at the Low Bar. I hear a healthy dose of Springsteen and punk here — think Gaslight Anthem but swap the youthful energy with the weight of experience.
That doesn’t mean these songs are any more muted. In fact, the band re-recording Crying‘s singular “To Catch a Plane.” Where the initial recording is permeated with regret, the new version is full of righteous fury at a person who chose to left the narrator behind.
Every time I spin the album, something new jumps out at me. A heavy hook here, a flash of lyrical brilliance there. “St Bridget’s Cross” stands out to me as a newer variation of the band’s main themes: carefully layered, maybe even a bit poppy, it finds The Sparklers at an emotional crossroads, perhaps in a place to process rather than vent. Contrast with “Positively Broad Street,” as much a testament to frustration as the righteous joyfulness of sticking things out for so long.
As with all of the band’s previous work, there’s always something to pull me back into this world. The music is a wall of sound, with the vocals sitting just behind the music, sometimes inaudible just as they would be at the local dive bar. And yet, there’s no shortage of flashes of lyrical brilliance, perhaps a reflection of the band’s world view that in spite of the chaos and existential meaninglessness of life, something beautiful always shines through. Always.