The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium

Well it’s time to take on more final look at The Mars Volta, with this, their “best” album, according to all the people who tend to use words like “best”:

I guess, depending on which version of the album you picked, you get one of two disturbing album covers!

This album was the first release from the newly-formed Mars Volta after the split up of their vastly overrated mother group, At The Drive In. The two guys involved in this group, and the 30 or so musicians they would eventually incorporate, decided that they had to make their music as unpalatable and complicated as possible in order to avoid mainstream success only enough to not have to return to their jobs at Burger King.

I’m sure we all know how well THAT went.

Yeah, despite the band’s best efforts, this album went on to be hugely mainstream, selling in excess of half a million albums, which is about 1/4th of their hipster listening base alone. Good thing they appeal to people who exclusively steal music from the internet, otherwise they might have toppled the charts!

So yeah, the album “sold” really well (eh heh), and to almost anyone I’ve spoken to on the subject, it’s generally said that this is their finest work. Indeed, I will say it’s different from other things they have released, but only in the sense that the utter chaos that this band presents to the listener is actually presented in listenable chunks called “songs”. Indeed, just about every song is distinct and features at least 1 start and 1 stop, which is something the band would not repeat until 7 years later, with the unforgivable Octahedron. Still, in the case of De-Loused, the trick pretty much works, because the songs are actually all distinct, and the limited amount of instrument occupying the musical space made for stuff that actually sticks with listeners between listens.

Really, there is only one distinct thing about this album that piques my interest: it was worked on by no less than 3 people who helped shape, of all people, Johnny Cash’s latter-day music. First we’ve got Rick Rubin, who produced the album in a one-time producing role with the band, then we’ve got two of the members of The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Flea and John Frusciante, who happen to be two talented members of music’s most annoying funk group. It’s hard to imagine musicians that have worked on other things being involved with the Mars Volta, since they sound like they’re from another planet, but I guess there’s this hidden penchant for doing this kind of music hidden in the most unlikely of musicians. I’m thinking, if it’s those 3, heroin must have been involved at some point.

In fact, if the word of a rock star can be believed, this is the one and only Mars Volta album that was inspired by drug use. The story, or “concept”, behind the album is about a guy who tries to overdose on drugs, winds up in a coma, dreams about battling his dark side, wakes up, and throws himself off a bridge. Are these lyrics actually in the music anywhere? I have no idea, I can’t understand what these guys are singing most of the time, and I’ve gone through all the other Mars Volta albums’ writeups without quoting lyrics, and I’ll be dad-blamed if I’m going to do it now.

The point is, this album is fueled by drugs, and drugs would ultimately take away the guy who helped to make so many funny noises throughout the album. This struck the band as a tragedy, even if it didn’t seem to detract from the sound any, and they named their next album (the first one I talked about, Frances The Mute) after the idea of him. It really all came together like one of those after-school specials, only instead of it being a bunch of 12 year olds doing piles of drugs and then learning a valuable lesson with no jail time, it’s The Mars Volta.

To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t really see how this is their “best” album. I will say it’s short at only just over an hour (still twice as long as most of my favorites), but what is it that separates this one from something like The Bedlam In Goliath? Is it because only a handful of musicians are present in the recording, thus making it less dense and unapproachable as the subsequent albums? Is it because of the almost complete lack of 15 minute tracks of water dripping and birds calling? Is it the lack of 15 minute songs in general, besides “Cicatriz ESP”?

I’m not too sure, myself. After listening to all 5 albums many, many times (ok not Octahedron, I listened to that crap twice), I have come to the ultimate conclusion that The Mars Volta’s albums all sound alike. I’m really not too bad at telling music apart either, I will fight to the death pointing out myriad differences between Radiohead and Muse or between Gentle Giant albums or even Johnny Cash albums, but with The Mars Volta, who are one of my favorite new bands, by the way, I just can’t put my finger on it. It could very well be the “singing parts” versus the “instrumental parts”, which are more balanced on this album than elsewhere, or perhaps it’s that the album is less complex than its would-be usurpers, but I still insist that the best parts of the subsequent albums all rival the entirety of De-Loused In The Comatorium in both quality and length.

Perhaps it’s that, like Flea and John Frusciante and whoever else, everyone else is tuned into the certain something that makes The Mars Volta sound like it does, and I, a lowly music fan, just can’t get my mind wrapped around it. If so, good job, music fans of the world, I’ve been writing about albums for 280 days now, but you were the ones who had it figured out all along!

The Mars Volta – The Bedlam In Goliath

Ok, ok, maybe I was a little too harsh on The Mars Volta’s new album. I guess when you combine just recently learning about a band that you like suddenly going “pop” just to piss off fans with a looming sense of “man I don’t have that much time to write my blog entry today”, then you may feel tempted to make your writeup for the day a 1200 word hate letter to a band that neither knows nor cares about your stupid blog.

So, in light of this, let’s talk about my favorite The Mars Volta album:

Now, unlike with the artist James Blunt, who decided to call his album Back To Bedlam despite his sound being anything but boring and organized, The Mars Volta actually aren’t the total opposite of the definition of “bedlam”. In fact, this album title is just about the perfect description for the sounds you’re about to have imposed upon you.

However, I’m not going to go into the sound just yet, because I can not talk about this album without bringing up its fantastical, highly dubious, yet awesome back-story.

At some point, while touring with disgraced pop band The Red Hot Chili Peppers, the guitarist for The Mars Volta, Omar, bought Cedric, the singer, an ancient Ouija board as a gift, like you do. Well, just like a very special episode of The Brady Bunch, turns out that ancient, mystical relics are not things to be trifled with. The Ouija board, which called itself “Goliath” through a series of “soothsaying” rituals that the band did after shows which probably involved a lot of “You’re moving it! *titter*” “No, you’re moving it! *giggle*”, proceeded to make the band’s new album wrought with complications when its “demands” were not met.

Among other things, the magic curse on The Mars Volta caused tracks to disappear, Cedric’s shoes to cause him injury requiring surgery just for walking like normal in them, and for the engineer of the fledgling album to run away from the studio screaming something about the band wanting to hurt people with their music. Well duh, engineer, we’ve known that for 3 albums already.

Anyway, finally someone has the guts to defy the dark powers of Parker Brothers, break the bastard in half, and bury in a location known only to that person and whoever he blurts the location to next time he’s drunk. The curse ceased, and production continued until the band finally had its album, which is mainly composed of songs about “Goliath” and various scraps of poetry attached to it.

So after all that trouble, is the album good? Oh, you bet it is.

The Bedlam In Goliath stands out to me as Mars Volta at its rockingest, and that’s kind of where they need to be, now that we’ve heard their “pop” offering. The album starts strong and doesn’t quit, only slowing down for a couple of genuinely entertaining slow numbers (as opposed to the extended periods of water dripping and bird-calls found in the previous albums).

The first song, “Aberinkula” (continuing the band’s theme of using nonsense for song titles) drops you right into the middle of the action and you’d better be prepared to rock out or else things are not going to go well for you. The song switches between a chorus that might as well be its own drum solo, and some really good kind of mystical Middle Eastern sounding stuff provided by the effects-heavy guitar and that awesome saxophone playing. The song only tarries for about 5 minutes before you realize it was just the introduction to the second song, starting now.

Yes, without a single pause, “Metatron” (love that title) begins its 8 minute journey right into the freak-out portion of your brain. Interestingly enough, despite the sheer complexity of this song looming like a cliff above us inferior musicans, the song is largely based around 2 chords. The journey to switching between those two chords is quite a harrowing one, though, incorporating rhythm changes and counter-rhythms that kind of screw with the original beat, and this is all coming from the same drummer. It’s quite possible at this point that the singer is singing about something, but I have listened to this album dozens of times without caring, particularly when I’m more concerned with the laser fight of guitar noise that goes on at the song’s half-way point. This is simply my way of appreciating music.

By the time the 2nd track ends, you almost feel like the album is done, but it’s only just started. Good ol’ Progressive Rock bands and their desire to fill every disc with as much music as possible. Anyway, “Ilyena” starts soon and it’s got much more of a groove than the previous songs, and thus is kind of a break from the pummeling, but that’s only to prepare you for the pummeling to come.

“Wax Simulacra”, the Grammy-award winning song-built-around-a-drum-solo, is so much rock condensed into 2 1/2 minutes that it should be illegal to distribute without 8 additional minutes of indie rock to even it out, but luckily for us, The Mars Volta don’t follow those kinds of laws. Nope, it’s 2 1/2 minutes of “holy crap”, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well, ok, “Goliath” comes close to the other way I would have it. This song is much more melodic than what we’ve heard so far, I am convinced. In fact, the song sounds a little bit more like The Mars Volta’s old band, if they would have borrowed Rage Against The Machine’s beats for the verses and Tom Morello’s pedal board for the vocals. Yes that isn’t a completely insane simile. Either way, this funky song contains one of my favorite lines in any song: “I’m startin’ to feel a miscarriage comin’ on”, and this is after a lot of random noises which is kind of great.

In case you’re tired of rocking out by now (wuss), we get about a 2 1/2 minute break with the slowed-down but still oppressive and heavy “Tourniquette Man” before moving on to “Cavelettas”, which is kind of like a punk song, only much faster, much more inclined to have weird sound effects accompanying strange time signature changes, oh and the whole thing is 9 minutes long. I guess it’s… not really a punk song at all, is it?

“Agadez” is the second “slower” song of the album, but only because it’s not really, really fast. It might at this time, or a few songs ago, that the album might start wearing on you. This is totally understandable, after all, more drums have been thrown at you in the first song than there are on most albums, and the average listener is not going to last through an hour of that. It’s kind of like the opposite of Late Album Slow-down, the album is too much rocking, so I won’t judge you for not remembering any of the later songs on the album, I sure don’t.

I do know that “Askepios” is kind of a 5 minute long dramatic chord behind held against another drum solo, which then switches to an extremely slow portion with dramatic diminished bits before moving on to the next drum solo. I like it, don’t get me wrong, it’s just so dramatic, also I hate the word “appetite”, and it gets a lot of play in this song.

I kind of regret that this album goes on forever, because if you skip the rest of it to move on to Miley Cyrus or something, you might miss a genuinely good song like “Ouroborous”, which is about as straight-forward a rock/metal song as Mars Voltas tend to get. It’s also got a series of guitar solos that sounds a little bit less like the guitarist genuinely hates guitars (which he does, I’m not even joking).

Coming sort of close to the end is another 9 minute epic called “Soothsayer”. This one utilizes crowded town street noise and violins for the first part, apparently the recording of these random locations is profound in some way, but we’re a little late in the album to be concerned with that.

Finally, we end this 75 minute adventure with “Conjugal Burns”, which is a good song in its own right, perhaps a little too screwed by effects for the guitar to sound pleasing, but pleasing is not what Mars Volta is about. They’re about attacking, and this song does that, particularly after the 2 minute mark. I would say more about the song, and the album in particular, but holy man, I have been listening to this album for an hour and 15 minutes now, so I think I have kind of exhausted all of the human synonyms for “this album rocks”. Basically, it does, it rocks for a very, very long time. There really aren’t a lot of resting stops in this album compared to the others, so for that reason it might be best to be broken up into multiple listens, that is, if you’re a wuss. Which you are.

The Mars Volta – Octahedron

It is expected, almost to the point of inevitability, for me to get obsessed with bands to the point where I have purchased, in tangible disc-based form, everything they have put out thus far. It wasn’t so hard with The Mars Volta, besides a few obscure items, they only had the 4 studio albums, and I have purchased and thoroughly enjoyed each of them. However, recently, due to monetary circumstances beyond my immediate control, I went ahead and downloaded this, their new album:

Now, progressive rock bands are a tricky lot. It seems to me that, as soon as they stumble onto some kind of hallowed ground of having a sound that is both interesting, complex, and popular, it’s time to pull the plug on that sound. It’s really a shame, because this activity has ruined careers before (see: Gentle Giant when I write about them in the coming months), and doesn’t bode well for our two fry-guy looking Grammy-award winning hipster duo.

See, I loved their previous album, The Bedlam In Goliath, even if I haven’t written about it yet. I will spoil the future writeup for you now and say it’s my favorite Volta album yet, because they’ve taken a sound that is fast, fussy, and just a huge assortment of high-pitched squeals and drum practices to a level that it actually is not only insane, but insanely catchy. I was excited about the direction that the band could go from there, because it just may have solidified them as my favorite “new” band (then again any band that formed less than 20 years ago is “new” to me).

Octahedron is not that. It is, in fact, so far from that in terms of interest and excitement and even the simplest of complex, chromatic note guitar wanking that I don’t even know what to think anymore. It’s not like me to be so disappointed by a band changing gears (try and ignore that when it comes up many times in the future), but the idea of growth is to somehow get better, right?

It’s not even that the band has gotten worse (well, not technically), oh no, that would be fine by me. If their insanity took over to the point where the album was almost entirely white noise, I would have been happy with that, it would at least give me something to be confused about.

No, what’s happening here is far worse. The band has decided to go pop. Not just “pop”, however, like the way that the punk fans mean it (also known as “selling out” though a band like Mars Volta doesn’t really need to change their sound to get lots and lots of money, you know?), because punk music is the same crap whether a bunch of money is thrown at it or not. I mean the band has changed their sound to accommodate the “pop” formula. Their songs are now shortened and definite (the whole album’s pretty short, to tell you the truth), their tunes are all slowed down with mostly standard beats (save for the final track, “Luciforms”, which is a really good track), and they still retain the whiny singing, high pitched whiny guitars, and a few awkwardly placed violins. Even the acoustic guitar numbers like “With Twilight As My Guide” aren’t particularly “good” acoustic guitar, compared to the segments in the previous albums where they’d break out some confusing acoustic playing that were actually really cool.

So, just what is the intention here? Are they slowing down because 4 albums’ worth of screaming noise were starting to get to be too hard to play in concert, or just too predictable? Did they feel they couldn’t keep writing the same diminished noise-fests and continue to take themselves oh-so seriously, so they thought they’d try to sound more like Pink Floyd?

Sure, there’s more emphasis on melody and solid, cohesive songwriting, but that’s not what I was secretly wishing for when I started listening to Mars Volta. What attracted me to the band, regardless of some light ribbing, was that their sound was wild, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. Sure they tended to stick with the same kinds of unpredictability and certainly their uncontrollable sound was largely under rather strict control, but smoke and mirrors or not, they are the only band doing that kind of sound.

The worst part about this album is that the reason it sucks so much is that it was all done to mess with the fans. I’m sure in the kind of bizarro-world of unironic irony that hipsters live in, this album will be regarded as a brilliant subversion of the audience’s expectations. I suppose that would be true, again, if the album was actually “bad” by any technical means, but you aren’t going to impress me by boring me to death, fellas, even if you did so under your own free will. I’ve never much been for pranks, anyway. In what I can imagine was some kind of emergency room situation where singer Cedric-something-Bixler was getting a blood transfusion and was a little woozy from the drugs, both prescribed and not, he called this the “Mars Volta acoustic album”, despite it containing less acoustic guitar or any other instruments than the much-better album Amputechture.

Still, these pretentious morons will make their fans listen to 15 minutes of birds chirping and water dripping on even their best efforts, so this album should come as no surprise. I’m just glad I’m not spending any actual money on it. I hope that these guys get their smelly afros back in the game of making unique, chaotic, and interesting music before At The Drive In absorbs them full-time. Also, please re-hire your saxophonist, boys, I didn’t realize until this album came out just how much you actually need him.

When bands pull off moves like this, it reminds me a little bit of Andy Kaufman reading the entirety of The Great Gatsby for an audience who were expecting him to his “funny foreign man” routine, which was a great joke at the fans’ expense, but doesn’t really work here. Though I appreciate what the band is trying to prove, this album is not much of a joke, it just shows how bad The Mars Volta are at doing straight music and being pretentious about it, which is kind of sad.

The Mars Volta – Amputechture

It’s time again, as it should be more often, to visit our little busy bees of rock, The Mars Volta. This time, we’re going to take a look at their seemingly second-most-beloved album, Amputechture:

Now, I mentioned in my other The Mars Volta writeup that the band can be characterized by lots and lots of rock, but the rock is occasionally broken up by a serene river of lengthy instrumental mucking about before assaulting your ears (in the kind of way that your ears are totally asking for, though) with pounding, fast-paced drums, crazy bass (including a solo this time!), and those wacky guitars being played like they were from another planet.

This time around, however, the serene river of mucking about actually more-or-less opens the album. “Vicarious Atonement” is a very slow, spacey, blues song that kind of messes with you if you aren’t already familiar with how these albums typically go. For this reason, I dig it. It’s good that I dig it, because it’s over 7 minutes long, and it’s nearly the runt of the litter.

Next up, weighing in at over 16 minutes, is the first crazy mess of a song of the bunch, called “Tetragammatron”. At times, it’s a normal song with an interesting guitar arpeggio and drum part to match, but every so often it breaks into the great chaotic mess you’ve come to expect from our afro’d heroes. The first one, a mere 5 minutes in, starts with backwards-tracked guitars and ends with horns and guitars fighting the vocals for high-note space somewhere in the stratosphere (vocals win the first round). Then everything drops out except for the guitar, which plays notes as if the guitarist thought the recording was over, then the vocals come in, then the guitars finish that little quiet time by tuning the guitar and bass down until the strings practically come off, then it’s back to chaos, and we’re only half-way through the song!

At some point, the song goes through more things and then ends on some loud static, which is the cue for “Vermicide”, which starts off rather slow, which is strange, given that it’s merely a 4 minute song. The presence of saxophones is something I hadn’t really noticed on the previous albums, so I guess this is where it starts, because they’re definitely present on the most recent album. Really though, the whole thing kind of serves as a build-up to the next song, “Meccamputechture”, even if it is its own self-contained song.

Still, “Meccamputechture” is a fine song, and its 11 minutes of length contains some interesting rock-out portions. The horn solo that turns into a chaotic backwards-tracked mess towards the end of the song is a particular highlight. I know I try not to mention the lyrics to The Mars Volta’s songs, but this one has some interesting little phrases in it, and they’re highlighted in the mix enough to where you can understand them almost half the time.

We are then given the aptly-named “Asilos Magdelana”, which is a creepy acoustic “classical” monstrosity performed mostly solo (or with a second acoustic guitar) for 5 minutes. Of course, I mean “monstrosity” in the most caring way, it’s actually really well done, but just a creepy song. Maybe it’s because he sings it in Spanish. I don’t know if this is an “I use far too expensive of headphones” thing, but there’s a lot of studio noise in this particular track, creeks and movement and such. Anyway, eventually the other instruments join in and we’re ready for still more rockitude with the next track.

That track, after a bit of a groovin’ drum machine intro, is “Viscera Eyes”, which I am fairly sure is also at least mostly in Spanish. This song utilizes full-on guitar chords (more of a rarity with this band than you may think) in a very interesting way against the rhythm of the song. It’s kind of like both are in a race to each next measure and there’s never a clear winner. Half-way through this song, however, there’s a bit of a change of rhythm and the whole thing goes solo-crazy before ending on that stuttering beat we’ve all come to love so much.

Finally, we come to the best song on the album, “Day Of The Baphomets”, at least, the song most designed to please an audience of me. For one, it starts with the afore-mentioned bass solo, and you should know by now that I enjoy a good bass solo. The beat itself is both crazy, and seemingly inspired by a certain beat that Deep Purple’s Ian Paice tends to favor for instrumental jams. But oh, that’s not all. Amidst all the other rock-out portions of this 12 minute song is an amazing percussion added to the already trippy drums that are slightly ahead of the drums in rhythm, while lending it a really excellent almost tribal quality and making things generally awesome. It’s portions like that that make me wish I could describe music better, you know, so I’m not wasting everyone’s time every day on this thing. Such is life.

Also I am not a fan of saxophone solos in general, but the screaming solos on this song are a perfect fit, so you’ll hear no complaints from this lone blogger.

Finally, the song “El Ciervo Vulnerado” brings the album out the way it came in, on a slow note. This one is much more “space” than “blues” this time, and there is a bit of whispering involved here. I’ll be totally honest here and say that, on the average listen to a The Mars Volta album, I will eschew some tracks in favor of others since these albums are so long. This is possibly the only album that I can happily start on track 2 and end on the second-to-last track and be totally fine all throughout. I understand that some music fans appreciate half an hour of guitar distortion and sitars and whispering nonsense while the bass guitar sludges nonsensical note after note, and for those people, the final track of this album has been written.

Still, all in all, a wonderful album, and might possibly be my 2nd favorite of the 4, but I guess we’ll have to wait until I talk about the other two albums before I pass along that kind of judgment.

The Mars Volta – Frances The Mute

I was kind of wanting to write The Mars Volta’s albums up backwards from the band’s latest album, The Bedlam In Goliath, since that’s the order I listened to them in, but I decided to go with Frances The Mute because it’s the one I’ve been listening to lately, since I found it brand new in a local CD store for $4.99. So there you go:

Thom Yorke of Radiohead described In Rainbows as Radiohead’s version of a  love-making album (he must have forgotten he said the same thing about Hail To The Thief). If it is indeed the case that listening to Radiohead is like making love, then The Mars Volta are the kind of lover that kicks the door down and charges with an electric egg-beater in one hand and what can only legally be called “The Obliterator” in the other, wearing nothing but the pelt of a Wolverine he killed with his bare hands. A night with The Mars Volta may mean extensive hospital rest, but you’ll never be quite the same afterward and will probably find yourself wanting more.

In particular, Frances The Mute brings the stunning chaos of The Mars Volta’s sound in excess, starting right after the acoustic intro to “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus”. The whole thing is just a chaotic mess of busy drumming, dynamic bass to match, and crazy guitar riffs that really demand repeat listening in order to take it all in. The lyrics… well we’re not going to talk about the lyrics, as a good portion of them are in Spanish and the English ones make no sense anyway. Such is the way of these things.

It’s quite all right, since vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala (that is an awesome name) suscribes to the “voice as an instrument” theory of singing, where high notes and loosely-strung-together ideas (also high) are just fine. It’s interesting, because the guy can sing any note that Matthew Bellamy can, but it’s not the feature of the song, it just goes right in with the mix of craziness. Only the song “L’via L’Viaquez” do his intense high-notes really stand out, that is, unless you’re listening for them, and for the 4 minutes of aggregate rocking, there’s about 7 minutes of meandering whispers of music.

That is, perhaps, the reason people seem to prefer the band’s other albums to Frances The Mute (though one fan I know considers Frances his favorite). The album rocks, all right, but may be better for beginners who want to ease into the band’s insanity, as there are frequent slow-down portions where the album nearly crawls (such as the entire 13 minutes of “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore (A) Vade Mecum”), but if you make it through these portions (or, you know, just skip ‘em), some amazing rock awaits (like the next track, “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore (B) Pour Another Icepick”). I guess it’s all a matter of asking yourself: just how much time do you have in your day for rockin’? If your answer is “All day man I’m stoned out of my mind!” then Frances The Mute is the album for you. If you only have a few minutes to spare between dropping the kids off at soccer practice to rock out to The Mars Volta, might I recommend Bedlam In Goliath as a more “all rock all the time” kind of experience.

Mind you, I am fairly new to the Volta sound myself. I really enjoy the albums, but like with most progressive rock, repeat listenings and intense concentration are required to make any sense of it all. I knew from the moment a friend played me a portion of a Mars Volta album in the car that I would need a lot more time to devote to listening to these guys to get a clear idea of what’s really going on. That seems like crazy-talk coming from a Gentle Giant fan who likes Prog in general, but these two dudes from El Paso, Tx. really have something going for them here.

If you didn’t notice, I’ve avoided going for a track-by-track analysis of the music, and the reason for that is because the whole album is a song, practically. “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus”, “The Widow”, and “L’Via L’Viaquez” stand alone as their own tracks, but two of those tracks are over 10 minutes long, and then the next two… uhm… Suites, maybe? The two multi-song songs are “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore” which is 4 tracks in one, and “Cassandra Geminni” is a 5-parter, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to tell you where one ends and the other begins.

Incidentally, I noticed that “L’Via L’Viaquez” is one of the tracks on the new Guitar Hero game, and I initially wondered how they got an 11 minute long song (well that isn’t “Freebird”) onto Guitar Hero, particularly given that more than half of the album meanders into improvised-sounding horn solos, but then I heard the song and found that there’s a “single” version that’s only 5 minutes long. It kind of makes me wonder why they didn’t just do that with the entire album?

I think the answer is “Genius”. Mr. Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez seem to fancy themselves as such, which is really how progressive rock gets started – when artists think they’re too smart for standard rock. They are probably correct, after all The Mars Volta enjoys an audience of people much smarter (or at least more pretentious) than myself, except for the Tool fans. For this reason, I try not to mention them too often in public, except to say they’re great and I enjoy their music when I have time to listen to an entire album.

Frances The Mute is really growing on me, as well. Despite its ridiculously long slow segments, there is more than enough jammin’ tunage to fill out a lengthy bike ride. In particular, the “Cassandra Geminni” segments are a lot of fun, despite the singing occasionally lapsing into slurping. I also think “Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus” is a great way to start an album, 13 minute length notwithstanding. Indeed I would say the night of passion is worth the weeks of pain, and I’m going to stop using that dreadful analogy immediately.

 

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