Fourteen songs is definitely too many. For a long time I thought twelve songs and 45 minutes was the best album length; recently I've been finding ten songs and 35-40 minutes is better, but maybe that says more about the sort of music I'm listening to than anything else. Sparta's first album, Wiretap Scars, was twelve songs and 48 minutes and, mostly unrelated to those facts, was a great album (albeit one dominated by the opening song). On their second, Porcelain, they went for 14 songs and nearly an hour. It's too long. No post-hardcore album needs to be that long. It's probably worse when you note that two of the songs are actually minute-long interludes (so unnecessary). There's probably a good ten song album in there, but there's neither ten I love enough to suggest keeping, nor four I hate enough to suggest removing (beyond the two interludes); there are twelve mostly similar songs. If I picked four songs to remove and someone strongly disagreed, I definitely wouldn't feel strongly enough about my choices to argue against them for any amount of time (but I very much doubt this imaginary scenario will ever happen - I can count on one hand the number of people I've ever spoken to about Sparta, let along grilled them on the finer details of their opinions on the band's second album. I think I'm safe).
Anyway, a few months after buying Wiretap Scars in Canberra and falling in love with the opener, Cut Your Ribbon, I was really pleased to find this double-vinyl copy of Porcelain in a shop in Heidelberg called Vinyl Only. They had an interesting selection of records and I bought this as well as the only Rancid album I own for £7 each (a quick look on Discogs has this one selling for a good number of multiples of what I paid for it, which is surprising, but nice to see). I was excited to hear this one most when I got back home, although that was after a stop in Vienna and Lancaster, so it was at least a week later. On top of that, I didn't have much chance to play it before flying back to Australia, but I think I did take a taped copy back with me.
Porcelain never grabbed me in the same way Wiretap Scars did, and I partly blame the duration for that - too many songs that are too similar. I liked Sparta's take on post-hardcore and it felt it was a good step away from being an ATDI v2.0, but it does run thin over an hour. The singer's voice isn't the easiest on the ears, and they tended towards neater, grander production values which is unusual for this style of music. On the other hand, the guitars that twinkle on top of pretty much every song are brilliant and turn an otherwise very uneventful album to one that has some nice moments. Lines in Sand is a great example of that - without the guitars on the chorus it would just be a thoroughly dull melodic rock song - same goes for Tensioning (which is lucky because even the singer sounds bored of the chorus). The opener, Guns of Memorial Park, is a great song - classic Sparta and brilliant drums (it feels like the production focus on that was far greater than most the other songs). Death in the Family is another highlight, and one of the catchiest songs on the album. La Cerca has a strong chorus, End Moraine is good and heavy and the screams of "Oh god, I miss you" at the end of Travel by Bloodline are emo-perfection (although not a patch on Slint's use of the same line, of course). Splinters finishes the album with more energy than most of the songs that came before it combined - if the whole album was as frantic and urgent as that song, this review would be way more positive. It's the closest they come to Cut Your Ribbon by a long way, but is hidden away as the fourteenth track after 55-minutes of songs that barely stand close to it. Quite why they decided to put it there I don't know. Going out on a high is a bold move when it's after so many lows.
Two years later I got a copy of Sparta's third album, Threes, on cd for £2.30 in Bart's CD Cellar in Boulder and was beyond underwhelmed by it. There was one song that sounded like it might have been a Coldplay cover. I can't even think the last time I listened to that (I should probably give it another go. At least they had the good sense to keep that one to twelve songs). The trajectory of Sparta's three albums for me is then a fairly depressing one - strong opener, weaker second and bad third. They wrote some good songs in that time and were great each time I saw them, so I don't begrudge them that - I think I got about as much enjoyment out of them as could reasonably be expected.
Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 14
Cost: £7 new
Bought: Vinyl Only, Heidelberg
When: 23/01/06
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: no
