Heave Media

Sparklace Shines Bright

Cale Parks Succeeds Where Most Electronica-ists Fall Just Short

Cale Parks

Sparklace

Released on Nov 04, 2008

Drummers and percussionists, especially in indie band outfits, are usually pushed to the back of a band’s “personality” focus. Those all-important backbones of the band are so easily subsumed by the voices and personalities of lead guitars and overdramatic frontmen (not that I’m pointing any fingers, Brendan Canning and Conor Oberst).

Cale Parks does anything but settle into the background. Taking his experience as the drummer/percussionist for Polyvinyl Records’ favorites Aloha and distilling his own creative energies in his Greenpoint, NY home, Cale brings us his second (and even more ambitious) solo album in two years.

Sparklace, it should be noted, feels more like an experiment than what a lot of its press would have you think. While its tracks do possess choruses, verses, hooks, and melodies, these loosely-defined attributes are as close to a “pop” record as Sparklace gets.

And it’s a good thing. Cale’s aesthetic is not of a pop band. He shouldn’t be acting like one. In the first “Intro” track, a dense, muted rhythm of faint screams that turn out to be well-tailored synth noises, we get a glimpse into haunting depths that will become the mantra from the record. “Every Week Ends” takes the idea up a notch with all the post-apocalypticism of The Faint without all the vulgar immediacy and overdramatics.

Part of the appeal of this album is that Cale recorded every bit of it himself. If there is a drum machine sample, he played the drums for it. Likewise with the vibraphone, pianos, and keyboards laced throughout. In this way, he’s transcendent of his peers who have built careers on the maxim: “Sample without borders… nor responsibility.”

A bit of the album plods along through barely-above-ambient electronica, but Cale and his mastery over combining loops and blips with real sound comes across all too fully on tracks like “Age of Reform.” There are at least three keyboard parts going on - all with delays involved - his standard oeuvre of digital white noise melody, and Cale’s voice finds time to shine somewhere in there, too. Tracks like this one and “Two Haunt Me” are stuffed fatter than your mom’s Thanksgiving turkey and won’t even put you to sleep during the game.

My biggest problem with this album wasn’t anything in the music. In terms of indie-electronica, Cale Parks has truly found a voice all his own and it’s a damn interesting one with all the musicianship and outthrust cajones to back it up. My beef is with the press that Polyvinyl put out surrounding it. This isn’t a pop album. Nor an indie album. This is experimental electronica done well. One listen will have you on edge, wondering what you just heard. Three or four listens and you’ll wonder how you keep on noticing new sounds in even the smallest places. For me, that’s the real success of Sparklace: how this one person, typically a percussionist, can loop and layer his way to a sound more interesting and engaging than all the music formulas so many bands cling to.

Posted by Mark Steffen on Nov 10, 2008 @ 9:00 am