Through The Sparks

Folk Rock / Progressive / Rock

Birmingham, AL

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About

The garage is divided by rows of old pianos, organs and other keyboard instruments... and scattered with guitars and guitar periphernalia. Some are rescues from the Goodwill, others encased in inch-thick Guitar Center gloss. The floor is an orgy of cables. Crumpled horn charts are a pile of papers littering a nightstand beneath a framed hologram of the Last Supper (one of three in a set behind a couple of overturned drum kits). The pieces of a broken Phrenology head sit in a plastic CD tower awaiting a tube of glue. The room looks as if everything in it panicked all at once and suddenly came to rest.
Now and then when the sun comes through the cracks, the garage looks the way a Through the Sparks record sounds. All of this is on every song. When Through the Sparks recorded their first full-length release, Lazarus Beach, sessions were repeatedly interrupted by floods in the studio due to an adjacent swimming pool built on higher ground. Moving around twice and finally mixing in other Birmingham studios, they were able to complete the album, which was released in May of 2007.
The band relocated its Alamalibu Studios to the garage basement of Through the Sparks singer Jody Nelson's recently acquired home in east
Birmingham, Ala. After the first hard rain, the 80-year-old basement was full of more than 60 gallons of water. The band moved all of its soggy equipment into the back of a paint truck and fixed the three pin-sized holes where the rain came in. Later, the water turned up in a puddle in the
middle of the room... more Dam-Tight on the floor, then in another spot, steaming around the furnace. It always finds somewhere else to go.
Put the carpets outside. More Dam-Tight. Call the piano-tuner, dry out the organ. Turn off the drier. Record more music. Fetch that shaker out from underneath that mess of broken lawnmowers. Move that piano out of here... It's a piece of shit. Get a piano. Call a tuner... that one died; find a new one.
All of this aside, making records in garages has its advantages. You're on your own time, and doing what sounds good is what gets done... as opposed to right or wrong according to the guy at the bona-fide studio who used to run cables for Molly Hatchet.
But, Through the Sparks doesn't play what has become known as garage rock. Self-taught, but well-learnt, the five core members of Through
the Sparks are Nelson, Greg Slamen, James Brangle and brothers Thomas and Nikolaus Mimikakis. Everyone plays just about everything, but the band often brings in Chad Fisher and Gary Wheat, to take up the slack on horns, and Shawn Avery and others on utilities. The occasional string section might be seen waiting in the driveway for the door to grind its way open. Additional back-up singers are called in now and then. Live, the lineup has expanded to include as many as 14.
Instead of the Stooges, think the Basement Tapes, without the olde world camp... or Steely Dan with it. (Then again, not on an entirely different planet from the Stooges, either.) Imagine Burt Bacharach writing songs for Los Lobos with the youthful energy and abandon of 1960s psychedelia, but with knowledge the consequences. Think album-era, country Grateful Dead, or Lennon-McCartney's R&B, but with a Bowie-Reed swagger... all of this accompanying somehow Southern songs.
This is modern American songwriting and music production. While covering a lot of ground, they make sure that the moment a song comes
on, you'll know it's Through the Sparks. Production is somehow clear, but echoic, ethereal but bright, standing on a modern-quality low-end.
The band is currently at Alamalibu recording its follow-up to Lazarus Beach and planning tours for 2008.