Sparta – Porcelain
(Geffen)

It’s really gotta to suck to continuously toil in the shadow of your former band and former bandmates, but unfortunately for Sparta they seem doomed to such a career of cut short comparisons and quick criticisms. Realistically, At The Drive-In are all but forgotten now; Grand Royal is out of business, their website no longer exists and their videos certainly are not getting MTV airplay anymore, but somehow they still greatly overshadow Sparta. The problem is that Sparta are the more mainstream and predictable of the two spin-off bands, and they’ve never really done anything to distinguish themselves from At The Drive-In, much less progress beyond them.

I still stand by my praise for Sparta’s debut album Wiretap Scars, but maybe part of my appreciation for the album was based on a simple need to hear something new that was even remotely connected to ATDI. Once Cedric and Omar unleashed the Mars Volta LP, it absolutely knocked Sparta down a few notches, making their music seem generic and conventional by comparison. Fans out of the Sparta camp will tell you that Omar and Cedric are egomaniacs who broke up At The Drive-In and that The Mars Volta are pretentious and overrated. Well, I’ll tell you one thing… at the end of the day, they were the most talented members of the band. Sparta can write some decent songs, but they’re not even on the same page in terms of creativity.

Now that Sparta went ahead and recorded a second album, I thought I’d give them another chance to truly prove themselves. I can’t say they really came through. This album has made me see Sparta as one of those bands that could be mistaken for “nu-metal” and suddenly have a breakthrough single that would launch their careers into the stratosphere. But the truth is, with this album they don’t seem liable to make an impression on anyone any time soon.

I hate to say it, but sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and the cover for this album sums up the band for me. It just looks like they didn’t even have the artistic inspiration to come up with any artwork or design concepts, so they just hired someone else to create it for them. What does this swan logo have to do with anything? As a result the cover is bland and not eye-catching at all.

Musically, there is very little that stands out on Porcelain either. I was half-expecting every song to be a relentless assault of heavy guitar riffs and screaming, but surprisingly many of the songs are not all that aggressive. At first I thought this was a nice change of pace, but then it became clear that aggressive music was the only thing that really worked for them in the first place.

Jim Ward tries a lot of actual singing on this record as opposed to screaming, but he often stumbles through awkward melodies. He fit the role of back-up singer well in ATDI, but a whole album of his vocals with nothing else gets irritating after a while because there is no variety or range to his voice. On poppier tunes like “Hiss The Villain” and “La Cerca” he comes close to pulling it off, but then there’s songs like the closer “Splinters” and “Travel By Bloodline” (which closes with Ward repeatedly wailing “I Miss You”) that just make me wince and feel uncomfortable.

There are moments of cool guitar work on this album, particularly the incorporation of harmonics and dreamy reverb like the opening of “While Oceana Sleeps”, the morphing notes in “Guns Of Memorial Park” or even the lead riff of “Tensioning”, but the sound always ends up being ruined by needless digital guitar effects or dull and inelegant breakdowns with no flow. Believe it or not, there are times when Sparta sound more like The Deftones than I ever thought possible, unfortunately they are tapping the cheesy side of the Deftones that I don’t like.

They have tried to branch out on a few tracks like the 8 and a half minute “From Now To Never”, which downshifts to a melancholy ending with a french female voice-over, slide guitar and piano, and the out-of-place “P.O.M.E.”, a 45 second experiment in effects on a drum solo. One gets the feeling that they are trying to keep up with The Mars Volta in this department, but they do not manage to pull anything brilliant out of these aimless jams.

I guess if you listen hard enough, you can still find echoes of At The Drive-In on this album, but for the most part Sparta have succeeded in moving towards a sound more their own. This is probably their only notable achievement with Porcelain, but the farther they get from ATDI, the less listenable they become. There may be more development and progression in Sparta’s future but I could also see this leading them towards a musical dead end. I don’t recommend the album, and I’m doubtful as to whether or not I’ll give them another chance to prove themselves again. — Sean