The Mars Volta - Octahedron (2009)

I apologize well in advance if this review resembles something I would spew in my Two Minutes Hate, but I've never been one to pull back on my punches, and I don't intend on doing so here. This album fucking sucks. (You can stop reading here if that's all you require.) If Bedlam In Goliath was considered their loudest and most bombastic, this album is their most quiet -- quiet as in I could take a fucking snooze, from stem to sternum, in Lake Baikal, Russia and this would not stir me from my peaceful sleep. Anyone take Ambien? After this album, I know by not knowing, in an approximate sort of way. To say that the album is terrible, really, isn't exactly fair, though -- it simply evokes nothing. It's drib drab dribber drubber drowl, a pocket of dark matter in the expanding nothingness we call our universe, worthy of not even the margin of space it now occupies in my small apartment. Oh, and the lyrics -- БОЖЕ МОЙ - the lyrics for these guys have always been -- how do I say it succinctly -- stupid, with two o's. Swathed amidst the innumerable layers of sound on their previous albums, it was harder to notice just how fucking juvenile and 7th grade the lyrics were, but now I am convinced that Cedric thinks he is a fucking warlock. Good luck to him. Personally, I always wanted to be a samurai, but that cuirass looks way too heavy for me and besides, can you imagine me with a sword? Hack hack hack. So have at it Volta fans. Eat this nu-progadelic like fistfuls of sloppy wet shit at a carnival cookout contest. Everyone else, give thanks that it ends quicker than anything else they've released. F

The Mars Volta - Terminal 5 - January 14, 2008

Let me be very clear. This show consisted of two parts -- the one I hated, and the one I loved. After Cedric and his permed buffon and Omar the cracked-out Hendrix made to the stage with roaring approval, everyone suddenly went deaf. That's because for songs 1-7 of the setlist, the sound check technician thought we were at Wembley Stadium. Much like an atom bomb incinerates everything within blast radius, the Mars Volta destroyed our ears with an adverse Phil Spector wall of sound. Besides the staccato drumming, all I heard was noise and an occasional "exoskeletal" or "humans as ornaments." The saxophonist was blowing, Cedric was wailing, Omar was riffing away -- but I nor the entire tepid audience could hear a thing -- for 90 fucking minutes. I honestly wished for the concert to end.

Then, brothers, it came. "Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus." Oh, bliss, bliss, and heaven. Gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. Gravity all nonsense now. "Cygnus" morphed into an extended jam with Cedric climbing the side balcony and spastically plucking the safety wires. "Drunkship Of Lanterns" was simply frenetic. A new tune, off their soon-to-be-released Bedlam In Goliath, "Aberinkula" was positively sick. And then, to end it all, the sickest Volta song you'll ever hear, they played "Day Of The Baphomets." Cedric says he awoke in NYC to the sound of jackhammers and thought it appropriate to end the show in similar fashion. Nice, nice indeed. Too bad the concert just got started right as it ended. C

Setlist:
Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)
Viscera Eyes
Wax Simulacra
Goliath
Conjugal Burns
Tetragrammaton
Agadez
Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus
Metatron
Drunkship Of Lanterns
Ilyena
Meccamputechture
Aberinkula
Day Of The Baphomets

The Mars Volta - De-Loused In The Comatorium (2003)

The Mars Volta: currently wearing the helm of Prog Band Extraordinaire. Well, not quite. As those who know me in life have heard me gripe, the Mars Volta think they are better than they actually are, and have the pretensions of grandiosity of a great prog band, but sound more like they try to advertise themselves as a prog band rather than just be one. As first evidenced here, their freshman effort, De-Loused In The Comatorium, is a fable in artificiality.

The album begins strongly enough with "Son Et Lumiere" -- a nice opener if any into what is arguably the album's finest track, "Inertiatic ESP," a wicked number with shifting time signatures, dissonant guitar phrasings and all kinds of other things goin' on, man. Unfortunately, it ends with what I call "drugscapes" -- music otherwise horrible to even the most progressive of music listeners but that only drug addicts can appreciate (or the band members themselves). Drugscapes contain nothing of intrinsic musical value and are nothing more than flavoring particles in a sentence; like the German doch, they add nothing but pretense and pomp. (More on this later.) "Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)" is a good song, but I worry sometimes that Cedric's wailings resemble modern-day emo angst; and this perplexes me, mostly for the need for reliance on such childish expressionist emotion. "Drunkship Of Lanterns" is yet another centerpiece of quality on the album and I always dig this one.

Otherwise, let me return to the most horrendous use of drugscapes during the most pivotal track on the album, "Cicatriz ESP." All the makings of a great epic song exist, but the band apparently prefers the proverbial l'art pour l'art sentiment here, as it inserts a meaningless and seemingly endless four-or-so-minute drugscape that utterly annihilates the glorious momentum the song had held hitherto -- which is precisely the difference between good prog and bad prog: no meaningless dawdling. In the very least, a poseur prog band must realize that its much more intelligent listeners can recognize the difference between weak jams and random space effects as meaningless dawdling. Alas. "Eriatarka," "Televators" and "Tira Me A Las Arenas" are weak. Unfortunately, these fellows greatly improve upon their strengths for their next album, Frances The Mute, but stupidly ignore their weaknesses. For now, though, let's stick with one subject. B