Mael Sparks

Past Tense is a brand new career-spanning collection by the provocateurs of pop - Sparks. Masters of reinvention, with an unappeasable ambition and a ravenous hunger for the now, Sparks – brothers Ron and Russell Mael – have been creating eye-poppingly brilliant pop music for more than 50 years. PAST TENSE: THE BEST OF SPARKS is an immaculate lesson in how to stay consistently interesting for fifty years. With sleeve-notes by Simon Price*, each track is hand-picked by Ron and Russell to best epitomise the era of Sparks from which they are drawn - forerunners of art rock, inventors of the synth duo, masters of new wave pop, Europop experimentalists and self-revisionists, in the 21st century they pioneered the electronic opera before delivering 2017’s pop masterpiece Hippopotamus.

Sparks - Shortcuts: The 7 Inch Mixes (1979-1984) [2CD] (2012) {Repertoire}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (image)+CUE+LOG -> 819 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 245 Mb
Full Artwork @ 600 dpi (jpg) -> 186 Mb
© 2012 Repertoire Records | REP 5255
Rock / Synth Pop / New Wave / Pop Rock

Since they emerged into the mainstream in 1974, Sparks brothers Ron and Russell Mael have endeared themselves to successive generations of fans with their wry humour, offbeat quirkiness and lyrical and musical inventiveness. This compilation picks up the story in 1979, when Sparks commenced a renewed assault on European chartdom, with Giorgio Moroder - the Italian-born producer who, with Pete Bellotte, had turned Donna Summer into a disco megastar. It charts a particularly fertile period in a long career.