"Wake up! Can you hear me?" So begins "Cut
Your Ribbon," the lead track on Wiretap Scars,
the first full-length offering from El Paso, Texas'
Sparta. Set for release Aug. 13, 2002, on DreamWorks
Records, the album is both a logical extension of, and
a quantum leap beyond, the ragged promise of the three-song-and-one-remix
Austere EP, released in March of 2002. Wiretap Scars
is the sound of the underdog triumphant. "Before
Sparta, I was struggling," Jim Ward recalls, "trying
to find a happy, ideologically perfect place. Once Paul
[Hinojos] suggested pursuing what is now Sparta, there
was no more questioning. It felt undoubtedly, wholeheartedly
the right thing to do. And the writing process was totally
and immediately carefree, loose and happy. Knowing each
other so well music-wise made for good chemistry, but
the new energy has made for a really welcome chapter
in all of our lives." When Ward talks of chapters
in the members of Sparta's lives, he's not exaggerating:
There's history there. Despite their relatively tender
ages, the various members go back as bandmates and peers
at least to 1994. The family tree begins with Ward,
Paul Hinojos and Tony Hajjar playing in at the drive-in,
which Ward co-founded in 1994, and intersects with bassist
Matt Miller's former band, Belknap, and the Restart
label. Restart was founded by Ward and Hinojos as an
outlet for other El Paso artists. It released Austere
(with DreamWorks) and has also issued records by Universal
Recovered, Airplanes Are Better and more. If El Paso
has the dubious distinction of shaping the sound and
aesthetic of Sparta from day one, Wiretap Scars works
in color and perspective from all corners of the world.
Growing up on the Texas/Mexico border, the band members
- whose ethnic makeup ranges from Mexican to American
to Lebanese - have witnessed the division of First and
Third World living conditions by a chain-link fence
as a fact of daily reality. This inevitably shapes the
moods and textures of songs like "Cataract,"
which evokes the expansive vistas of their native town,
or the bleak yet hopeful struggles of "Echodyne
Harmonic." Elsewhere, new worldviews and experiences
inform "Air," with its protagonist preferring
life-ending disaster to the responsibility of life-changing
decision, "Collapse" and its imagery of bodies
"shut down in Bordeaux," and the seemingly
more autobiographical "Glasshouse Tarot" and
"Red Alibi." Early Sparta fans will no doubt
notice the creative leaps and bounds that have taken
place since work-in-progress versions of "Cut Your
Ribbon," "Air" and "Collapse"
first surfaced in spring 2001 on the band's Spartamusic.com
website. Likewise, Austere featured early versions of
Wiretap Scars' "Cataract" and "Mye,"
as well as a remix of "Echodyne Harmonic"
and the non-LP "Vacant Skies" ("Vacant
Skies" appears on the U.K. and Japanese pressings
of Wiretap Scars only). Primal as they were, these formative
efforts nevertheless helped to build a following almost
instantaneously, as fans turned out to watch the material
evolve as Sparta made its way from Texas to Iceland
and virtually all points in between in its first eight
months as a band. "Our first tour was awesome and
humbling at the same time," says Hinojos. "We
basically had to start from scratch, cobbling together
11 shows in the western U.S., but the response was instant.
We were blown away by not only the support we had from
the kids - who came out in force - but also by the response
we received from them. We can't express enough gratitude
for that." Since then Sparta has done more than
its share of traditional touring in the U.S. and overseas,
including a stellar showing at this year's South By
Southwest conference and an extremely successful co-headline
outing with Thursday. They eventually landed at Armory
Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, where work began
in earnest on Wiretap Scars with Jerry Finn (Blink 182,
Green Day, Sum 41) producing. "When we started
writing together," says Hajjar, "Our main
focus was just to have a good time and release the energy
and music we had boiling up in us. Our early demos were
recorded in the space of about a week. Austere was more
focused because we started finding our place as a band.
Working on the first full album was even more so: Two
weeks of pre-production, Jerry Finn and the choice to
make the record in Vancouver, removed from everything
we know in El Paso and Los Angeles - it was a completely
different kind of energy." And so, this underdog
has grown into a formidable beast, one that has crisscrossed
the globe and recorded an incredible debut album in
barely a year - and is holding its own on an arena tour
with Weezer and Dashboard Confessional at the time of
this writing. Clearly, this is a band that believes
in making every moment count, as a lyric from Wiretap
Scars closer "Assemble The Empire" indicates:
"Don't make this fake/ Last second of life."
Hajjar concludes: "The whole process has been rapid,
but super-positive and fun. Overall, we're just so ready
to work."
Band description courtesy of Luckymanonline.com
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