Steely Dan or Sparks

socrates17 wrote: rogerthat wrote: ^^ By no means is Steely Dan a dead serious type of band and certainly songs like Everything You Did are very funny. But it's more subtle/wry kind of humour while Sparks is outrageous. Different approaches and both work for me. <font style=": rgb255, 255, 255;"> <font style=": rgb255, 255, 255;">I freely admit that I respond more absurdist, Dadaesque humor, but Ron Mael's songs could be quite subtle.  All You Ever Think About is Sex starts with a funny catalog of places the narrator and his lover got caught "doing it" but then it shifts to a minor key and the lyric is:  "In a world of lovers, we don't love each other much;  Fact is we're too busy to love each other much."  Which is a rather melancholy way to conclude a funny song.  Ron often makes you think.

Didn't mean to say that Sparks are NEVER subtle. But the outrageousness is right on the surface, both in the lyrics as well as the music. So it's a hook which Steely Dan don't have. I got into Sparks right away but with Steely Dan I had to persist. Both the beauty of their arrangements as well as their humour took some time to reveal their full splendour.

Sparks is one of the great bands of all time.  They're one of the few who have maintained their quality from their first album to their most recent, a huge span of time.  Ron Mael is one of the very few songwriters of the rock era who is on a level with George & Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Vincent Youmans, Kurt Weill, Noël Coward, et al.  Most songwriters of modern times can't begin to compare (John Cale & Peter Blegvad are also exceptions to that rule) and that has something to do with my preference for prog & jazz, where there is usually something interesting going on with the instruments.  I've seen Sparks live multiple times, starting with their first lineup in 1971.  I've never seen Steely Dan, nor owned a Steely Dan album, but what I have heard seems so serious!  Do they have a sense of humor?  I don't like music which lacks a sense of humor, something that Sparks has in abundance.  Wit.  It's about wit.

I guess SD, but damn are they both a hard pass. 

Seriously? Steely Dan lives on the highest plateau of recorded music with very few peers.

verslibre wrote: Neither.

Steely Dan is amazing

Steely Dan rules.

Both are excellent bands, but Ron Mael's stage stare, comic mime routines and Chaplinesque (or possibly Hitler piss-take, since he's of Jewish ancestry) moustache mean I'm going for Sparks. They're also very funny at times. I saw them live and you could certainly not describe them as boring.

I love Sparks but have to go with Steely Dan here.