Squeezing Out Sparks (1979)

I don't have much sense of how this is regarded nowadays, except in my own mind, where I generally find it vaguely denigrated as overrated and/or simple critics' favorite. This is unfortunate because it is actually much better than that, although it is also somehow timebound too in a sense, fastened down there in the past of the late '70s/turn of the '80s, constantly receding. Graham Parker turned out to be remarkably easy to put away. I don't think he wrote anything even close to his early stuff from this point on. It makes me a little sad, remembering my own various obsessive periods with him, and I wonder if that isn't what draws me back to it now, nostalgia. On the level of its weirdness—the wild swings at Japanese culture and UFOs and bad relationships (with and without abortion intimacies), a surprising lyricism alternating with retreats to winning yobby throwaways, e.g., "Saturday Nite [sic] Is Dead"—Squeezing Out Sparks is still remarkably fresh. No horns on this outing, just a rock band—Brinsley Schwarz, Martin Belmont, Bob Andrews, Steve Goulding, Andrew Bodnar—hitting all their marks with precision. And going through the album again recently keeps peeling off surprises: the raw surge of "Discovering Japan," the shocking tenderness of "You Can't Be Too Strong," the plaintive declaration of "Passion Is No Ordinary Word," the poise of the big finish, "Don't Get Excited," and on and on it goes, the hits keep coming, rocking out at will with style, economy, and power. It's a remarkable set. It did win the "Village Voice" Pazz & Jop poll of its year (running away, as I recall) and even made the Billboard album top 40 (barely), and for several months was unavoidable, playing at every house party and get-together and loud. Squeezing Out Sparks is indeed, as I discover every time I get myself to return to it, a hard and brilliant thing, lean and angry and constantly insinuating. In many ways it represents a consolidation, a pulling-together (one last time, in retrospect) of the coequal powers of Graham Parker and the Rumour, in tandem, everything promised on those first three albums herewith delivered on, no denying and sign here. Play loud, as they say. Don't forget.