Sparta
Cut a Silhouette
EQUAL VISION
They say you don’t truly die until the last time someone speaks your name. Through his fame and films, John Candy has probably already secured a kind of immortality, but the new album from post-hardcore figures Sparta should ensure that he continues to live—or at least not truly die—for a little while longer. That’s because the title of the band’s sixth full-length (and third after a 14 year gap between releases) is taken from something Macaulay Culkin said about the late actor in the recent documentary about Candy’s life, describing how he entered your brain and “cut a silhouette” when you met him.
And so the title of the record was born, and with it a profound sense of prophetic meaning. Because a quarter of a century after Jim Ward formed the band out of the ashes of At the Drive-In, Cut a Silhouette does just that. From the moment opener “Split Lip” barrels out of the gates full of impassioned tumult, it’s clear that this record is special. Produced by J. Robbins of Jawbox and Burning Airlines, from start to end it feels like Sparta are firing on all cylinders. The two songs which follow, “Crater” and “Mouthbreather,” were both written with My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero, and while this record didn’t necessarily need any more urgency, his influence on those songs certainly adds to it.
But even on the eight songs Iero didn’t have a hand in writing, Sparta shimmer with a palpable sense of purpose and intention. “Daydream,” “Without Your Hands,” and “Everything You Say” all flow with high-octane, passionate intensity, as if the band need to expel these songs from their hearts in order to not spontaneously combust. There’s something about Ward’s voice here, too—it carries the weight of the world in its timbre, full of despair and hope and rage and wisdom and energy and emotion, all gathered over years of experience.
There are quieter moments, as well, which take all that stuff and transform it into something tender and vulnerable, whether that’s the muted-yet-boisterous countrified yearning of “See You Soon,” the universe-spanning ache of “Midnights,” or the gloriously tender finale “Glimmer,” which feels like it contains an eternity of human love, heartache, purpose, and hope within its three minutes. It’s a fitting way to end an album that lives up to its title, and which should cement Sparta’s legacy. It’s not often that a band produces some of their best work a quarter of a century into their career, but that’s arguably what Sparta have done here. It’s a guarantee that people will be speaking their name decades after anybody who helped make it has long shuffled off this mortal coil.
