Sparta

Sparta's Porcelain.

Related Content

• Ask a Mexican on Ethnocentric Idiocy and Etymology
  February 2, 2012
• Five Holiday Gifts For Your Hipster Sibling
  December 15, 2011
• Radiohead is Totally Playing Glendale
  November 7, 2011
• Foreign Affairs
  November 3, 2011
• Incubus at Comerica Theatre, 10/5/11
  October 6, 2011

More About

• Sparta
• El Paso
• Tony Hajjar
• Matt Miller
• Punk Rock

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

When At the Drive-In, the greatest multiracial post-punk band ever from El Paso, Texas, broke up three years ago, half of its members formed Sparta and began ambling down a road from Over the Top Town to Well-Meaning Dullsville. Wiretap Scars, Sparta's 2002 debut, was At the Drive-In with none of the original act's energy and all of the earnest emo piety it somehow avoided. On Porcelain, Sparta seems to consider reversing directions: "Hiss the Villain" is a breakneck blast of sharp-edged guitar fuzz and spiraling strings, with singer Jim Ward giving his typically murky lyric a refreshing immediacy, and in "La Cerca," rhythm sectioneers Tony Hajjar and Matt Miller manage to inject a little swing into the band's stiff-legged grind. Elsewhere, the band deepens its attack with the occasional post-Radiohead synth squiggle or slo-mo power-ballad tempo. But these guys remain some of alt-rock's most serious, humorless practitioners. Hopefully they'll take a lesson from their tour mates this summer, Incubus; they once put out a record called Fungus Amongus.