On my voyage through all the Sparks albums, some of which I haven’t heard in 20 or 30 years, here is my review of ‘Interior Design’.
This album took me a long time to get through.
1. So Important
Kind of a straight up rock song, with both 70’s and 80’s instrumentation at the same time. I’m afraid for the person he’s singing to, it sounds like a situation that will end badly. I’m trying to imaging hearing these keyboard sounds in 1988, and how incredibly dated they must have sounded even then. I like the lyrics. 6/10.
2. Just got back from Heaven
There’s a Stratocaster doing a skritchy-skratchy funk thing that I like, and more impossibly cheesy keyboard sounds. Someone responded to one of my previous posts that it sounded like Sparks was using all stock pre-programmed keyboard settings, and I think they might be right. This song sounds like something that might have been used in a montage in a lesser John Hughes movie. 6/10 I guess. Honestly I could rate both these songs as 5/10. They go right in the ear and out again.
3. Lots of Reasons
I like this song better than the two previous. Russel is being enthusiastic, which I always like, and the keyboards are more restrained. Honest 6/10. Hey what’s up with the cover of this album? She’s packing the same sweater she’s already wearing, and the same skirt with a different print, and he’s just delighted about it.
4. You got a hold of My Heart
I’m stuck on John Hughes now. This is the song that plays when Ducky finally gets a dance with whatever her name was in the movie. I don’t know if people from outside The States will know what I’m talking about. It’s fine for what it is. I can see now that I was way too hard on ‘Terminal Jive’. That album was art. It wasn’t art that I particularly connected with, but it was artful. 6/10.
5. Love-O-Rama
Yeah. There were a thousand songs in 1983-1984 that sounded exactly like this one. The instrumentation sounds exactly like ‘Tarzan Boy’, though that song was way more fun. 5/10.
6. The toughest Girl in Town
This one plays in the montage where Mary Stuart Masterson realizes how much she loves Eric Stoltz. 6/10.
7. Let’s Make Love
Same as ‘You got a hold of My Heart’. The vocals have such a stacatto delivery though, and I hate lazy song titles/concepts like this. 5/10.
8. Stop me if you’ve heard this before
I like this song pretty well. It’s still another 80’s movie song, probably one that plays when Judd Nelson realizes Ally Sheedy is banging Andrew McCarthy. I like the vocal delivery, more super dated keyboard/synth sounds. 6/10.
9. A walk down Memory Lane
Can there be any bass in this album? Sub turned all the way up and to the highest frequency I can. I like the lyrics to this song quite a bit. Musically it’s pretty boring. 6/10.
10. Madonna
This sounds more like what I think of as a Sparks song. It’s very difficult to rate. I know I enjoyed it the most of all the songs on the album, and that it kept my attention all the way through. 7/10 I guess. That’s probably too high. How is Russel’s accent on the foreign language versions? The Spanish one sounds pretty dodgy to me. The other ones sound better, but I don’t speak French or German.
There’s a couple more bonus tracks I’m not going to bother to rate.
Album rates 5.9/10. Rating these albums as an average of their tracks really doesn’t work. I think I like Terminal Jive more than this, yet rated it lower. With that one, after a string of 7 albums that I really like to love, it seemed like a punch in the gut, and I think I was too hard on it. Have to go back and re-listen to that one. This one…out of all the other albums I didn’t remember, I found songs to like and that I’ll re-visit more often. On here, I don’t know if I will. Maybe Madonna I guess. Next up, Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins.