![]() Versus the Austere take, its low-end hits harder, getting some added juice from the late producer Jerry Finn, who was at this stage right in the middle of redefining how to fuse punk grit with sleek, bang-for-your-buck sonics. Several of its compositions would be carried over to Wiretap Scars, including Mye, a simmering standout that catches light with undulating, serrated guitars and a chorus that cuts back against the grain. ![]() “It was a really good deal, so we took it,” Ward said succinctly, with the band’s debut EP Austere emerging shortly afterwards. Some of those songs found their way to DreamWorks who, in a move that very much spoke of the moment this sort of music was having, made Sparta an offer. So when I was around people and playing music – it’s emotional, and it comes out in a swell of fury… it was one of the greatest weeks in my life one of the most creative, spending 10 hours a day writing songs. ![]() “I just sort of shut myself out from everybody else. “I had locked myself in my house and not really done anything,” Ward told the Kindamuzik blog at the time. Their first songs emerged in a flurry after a short spell of inactivity. In those early days following At The Drive-In’s break up, Sparta moved quickly, and some of that energy is retained by the music. Opening with Cut Your Ribbon, a careening monster of a song, Sparta revel in crushing stop-start dynamics and roiling guitars, with Ward and Hinojos’ agitated barks carrying a huge, rough-and-ready melody. Ward is often viewed as the architect of At The Drive-In’s more forthright, aggressive moves, and on Wiretap Scars he underlined that rep. Sparta’s approach suggested a more granular interest in the original blueprints. If Relationship of Command said anything about post-hardcore, it was that its constituent parts would bend into all sorts of fascinating shapes before they broke. What, take on Relationship Of Command at its own game? They’d say you’re crazy, pal. “ What would the oddsmaker say?” Ward yells on Wiretap Scars’ second song, Air. But Sparta planted their flag in the same post-hardcore territory as At The Drive-In, staring down their own legacy, inviting comparisons, and suggesting that there was another side to the story. Two bands rose from the ashes: The Mars Volta, led by that headline-grabbing pairing, and Sparta, led by co-founder and guitarist Ward, bassist Paul Hinojos – who switched to six-string duties – and drummer Tony Hajjar.Īfter melding weirdo psychedelia with jazz fusion and prog on their first LP De-Loused in the Comatorium, The Mars Volta would likely have opted to play Dickey at chess, or Dungeons & Dragons. The El Paso band had been inconsistent, sometimes exciting, purveyors of wiry post-hardcore for a while when their third album Relationship Of Command blew apart expectations and set a fresh bar for their contemporaries to clear.ĭriven on by the incandescent chemistry of vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López, they flamed out only months after its release. In 2000, At The Drive-In had a truly dominant year of their own, and it came from patchy beginnings just like those of Dickey’s pre-Mets existence. Sparta’s first album, Wiretap Scars, suggests that Jim Ward and a couple of his friends, when faced with this proposition, would pick up a bat and see what happened. That year, if you had to play RA Dickey at something, gun to your head, you would have been wise to choose a sport other than baseball. He finished the season as an All Star, with 20 wins, 230 strikeouts and the National League Cy Young Award, given annually to the best pitchers in Major League Baseball, under his belt. In early June, he was the first pitcher in the majors to reach 10 wins, a run that included a Mets record 32 2/3 scoreless innings. Quickly, as the season rolled on, he became dominant. ![]() READ MORE: The Genius Of… Total Life Forever by Foalsīut in 2012, aged 37, RA Dickey stopped being fine.He bounced his way through invites to spring training and stints in Triple-A, working on an odd, unfashionable type of pitch called a knuckleball. ![]() It wasn’t all that good, but he did find a way to pitch innings in the majors with the Mariners, the Rangers, the Twins, and eventually the Mets. The first decade of RA Dickey’s professional baseball career was fine. ![]()
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