Since 1969, years before I was born, two L.A. brothers named Ron and Russell Mael have been singing harmony in fey voices, while recording clever, charming, insincere, wiseguy pop songs under the band name Sparks. They're still improving.

That's an oversimplification. For a year or two their band name was Hafnelson, and their pop songs combined lava-lamp fuzz guitar with keyboard sounds borrowed from the Doors. But they moved with the times, and before the 1970s ended, Sparks recorded albums of grandiloquent show-tune pop with bits of avant-garde experimentation; of operatic glam-rock; of thudding hard-rock; and of stunningly compelling European disco (No. 1 in Heaven, produced by Georgio Moroder, the mastermind of Blondie's "Call Me" and Donna Summer's entire career). In the 1980s they embraced first the snappy synthesizer playfulness of New Wave (Angst in My Pants was especially fun), then the generic overproduction of Phil Collins when he wasn't doing the drum break of "In the Air Tonight". In the 1990s, they adapted the pseudo-classical lilt of their early days to the pulse and tools of techno dance music.

At every stage of this evolution, Sparks sounded like themselves, writing and singing self-amused – but occasionally profound – songs about sex, girls, and relationships ... plus the odd first-person song from the point of view of a sperm cell, the Louvre, or an animal not chosen for Noah's Ark. They still do in this decade.

2002's Lil Beethoven was my new favorite Sparks album, and the title is quasi-accurate. Here the Mael brothers fully embraced string sections, pianos, timpanis, kettle drums, and sweeping classical-romantic melodies (although a loopier Gilbert & Sullivan influence still shines through the cracks). But the music, intriguingly, was Beethoven by way of Steve Reich, maximalist orchestra with minimalist structure. Lil Beethoven's songs were hooky 2-minute sketches made long and turned percussive, given intensity by repetition and slight, subtle variations. It peaked, for me, with the goofy yet heart-rending "How Do I Get to Carnegie Hall?", where the already-rhythmic joke answer ("Practice, man, practice") is woven into the obsessive monologue – "I practiced (on a Steinway), I practiced (on a Steinway), I was ready, I was ready" – of a concert pianist who became famous and successful for a girl who still won't love him.

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After about five minutes, I tend to find the repetition of actual Steve Reich music numbing or worse, though. Lil Beethoven, though excellent, has a few songs too fragile and light to survive their stretches on the minimalism rack. Hello Young Lovers is another blend of Beethoven with the modern world, but for this album Sparks have also adapted Beethoven's song structures, built to make 5-minute compositions flow: the sonata, the theme-and-variations. These are used in easy, natural-seeming tandem with the soft/loud alternations and bridges we've learned to enjoy in modern radio pop.

Meanwhile, these variations contain small borrowings from tense guitar-rock, jazz piano, metal, and meowing cats – not to mention rousing power chords worthy of Queen's Brian May – amid the booming string quartets, pizzicatos, choral rounds, flutes, and harpsichord. The result is that on Hello Young Lovers, even the thinnest, most barely-clever song ideas are _enhanced_ by their length: the ideas wrapped in decoration after rococo decoration, then twirled through steps that would be dazzling when performed by almost anyone. The further result, not that the Maels care what I think (I'm not a pretty girl and wouldn't sleep with them if I was), is that in 2006 Sparks have made, at almost sixty years old, what I consider their first truly great album.

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And they do it so off-handedly. "There's No Such Thing as Aliens", for example: that's a song title that could be fleshed out (did I just make a pun?) in so many ways. It could be sung from the perspective of an outer space creature – perhaps a sinister invader who's gotten a job where he can deny SETI its funding, or perhaps the title's a slogan demanding civil rights. It could be the last song of a father refusing to hide with his family in the basement when he's still got tax forms to complete and can't waste time worrying about silly laser noises from the backyard. It could be the song of a movie producer from 1974 as he turns down the script of Star Wars to focus on more socially-relevant fare like Airport and Towering Inferno. It could be the self-satisfied smirk of a psychopath who's just tried to save his job by mass-murdering 34 immigrant Mexicans.

Instead it's ... well, nothing, really. The title gets repeated a lot, there's some "Look out the door, look out the window" stuff, but the words go nowhere. The music, though: piano and pulsing strings set up a mincing light-opera melody that spirals in jolly faux-British voice. The strings speed and intensify, but then the echo effects on "Look!" are soft and spooky. Sleigh bells escort the strings back, and they twirl ever-tighter around sung repetitions of title. The Mael voices rise steadily in pitch and speed for an effect that's at once goofy (people's voices get higher on helium!) and almost frightening (people's voices get higher as they panic!). A thunder of timpani ends the track on a solemn note. It's probably the worst song on the album, yet I'd have no problem sticking it on a mix cd for a friend I wanted to keep.

More ambitious is "As I Sit to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral". Buzzy low organ gives a dark pulse to fast lyrics that repeat "Bye-bye-bye-my-ba-by, now-it's-time-time-time-for-me-to go-to-work-work-work-so-you might-want-to-make-your-way-from-here". Ominous rock guitar joins in, followed into the mix by harpsichord and by what woodblocks would sound like if they echoed like cymbals. True, there's a cute 2-second flute break where the Maels sing about beer, but soon the beer line reappears sounding as dark as its surroundings.

A pipe organ riff starts the next section; joyous violins and ecstatic chorale introduce a third section, then a calmer fourth. The pipe organ riff returns, bringing a bass drum, as a Mael's normal (low) speaking voice semi-raps "You know you're gonna be upstaged, upstaged again and again". The sections alternate and change and merge, telling their story. A harp and bongos get their brief interludes together; "Bye-bye-bye-my-ba-by" returns to prance over tinkly little piano; the happiest section is played over dissonant chords. The combinations swirl and strengthen, and when the music goes away for a brief spoken proclamation, the drama needed to make it work has been there. The pipe organ starts to resonate with the comfort that makes churches want it, and all is resolved.

The song is _more_ complicated than these two paragraphs suggest. Yet everything flows, everything fits. Unlike most progressive rock (a genre I love, by the way), "As I Sit to Play the Organ" doesn't _feel_ complex.

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"The Very Next Fight", building from solemn piano, is (and sounds like) a serious relationship song. "Metaphor", the funniest song here – "A metaphor is a breath of fresh air, a diamond ring, the first hint of summer ... Chicks dig metaphors. Use them wisely, use them well, and you'll never know the hell of loneliness" – bounces through genres with the sunny gospel-rock energy of Jesus Christ Superstar. The grand, fiercely rhythmic "Rock, Rock, Rock" is a throwback to Lil Beethoven, played like the London Symphony Orchestra's tribute to Spinal Tap; then again, "Here Kitty" slips a bit of a hoedown feel into barbershop quartet vocals.

"Perfume", which Sparks played while disguised as street musicians on the season closer of Gilmore Girls ("The olfactory sense is linked in the brain to memories of the past/ Well, screw the past!"), is jaunty and almost straightforward. Meanwhile, "Dick Around" justifies its title by putting its melody through every pace Sparks can think of.

Hello Young Lovers is an album about nothing, as Seinfeld was a show about nothing: even an intriguing war/romance metaphor like "Baby, Baby, Can I Invade Your Country?" is more a title than a finished idea. Because of that, the album almost doesn't seem like the massive accomplishment it really is. It will be no more influential on music as a whole than Seinfeld was on ... that analogy didn't work. Hello Young Lovers won't be important, because fifty-something musicians who last got radio play in 1982 don't tend to influence much of anyone. At least no one human. But the day you and I are quietly killed and buried, our places taken by pod people grown to steal our form, I figure at least one song here will be blasting, giddily, from what used to be our stereos.

Recommended: Yes