The Snocore Tour will roll into town tonight at the Newport Music Hall, with Sparta headlining the show.
The tour kicked off in Chicago on Saturday and features Glassjaw, Hot Water Music and Dredge.
“The Chicago show was great — the crowd was into it and we just enjoyed a terrific atmosphere,” said Tony Haijar, drummer for Sparta.
Recorded in Vancouver last January and released over the summer, “Wiretap Scars,” the band’s new album, has been well received by fans familiar with the guys when they were members of the band at the drive-in.
“I think we got a good response,” said guitarist Paul Hinojos, regarding the band’s new material and tour.
“We are very grateful for everyone that came out and supported us on that tour,” Hinojos said. “We had a lot of fun and made a lot of new friends.”
El Paso has the dubious distinction of shaping the sound and aesthetic of Sparta from day one. The family tree begins with Hinojos, Haijar and Jim Ward 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 signed Austere (with DreamWorks) and has issued records by Universal Recovered, Airplanes Are Better and more.
Growing up on the Texas-Mexico border, the band members — whose ethnic make-up ranges from Mexican to American to Lebanese — 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 world views 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.”
“Well I guess to describe the music, I would just say that we are rock music, because I think if you label your sound you will get stuck in that, kinda like a cage,” Hinojos said, in an interview with Hand Carved magazine. “So that’s why I say rock, because it’s so vague. We want to be able to do whatever we want, and to experiment.”
“We were humbled and excited to work with Jerry Flinn on this project,” Haijar said.
Flinn has produced records for such bands as Blink 182, Green Day, Sum 41 and many others.
“We met through a mutual friend and had breakfast,” Haijar said. “We made a real connection, but not business- wise, more of a connection like minded people make when they first meet.”
When asked about the nature of the show, he said the band plays on the feeling it gets in the moment.
“Whatever we’re feeling that day — the crowd, the venue, it all depends. Each show is different, but we try and give everything we have each and every night.”
Sparta will be on the Snocore Tour through its stop in Virginia, then shifting gears to open for 11 shows with Pearl Jam.
“We are thrilled to be working with them. A sound guy passed our album on to them, they liked it, and here we are,” he said.
Coming off their 2002 tour with Weezer, another with Pearl Jam, the band plans to keep busy rocking at the end of the Snocore Tour.
“We just signed on for a few dates with Queens of the Stone Age, which we are very excited about since we are all big fans,” Haijar said.
Tickets for the show cost $17 and the show starts at 8 p.m.
