Bedlam

I love the Mars Volta.

Not in an ironic, "look at the prog-rockers, teehee" kind of way, and not because of their hair, or how many of them there are, or because I like At the Drive-in, or because they sound a little bit like Led Zeppelin but on crazy techno pills from the distant future, or because Omar Rodriguez Lopez is a musical genius (or absolute fruit loop, depending on your opinion of twenty minute guitar noodling and lyrics about spider webs, eyeballs, ham or some such nonsense), or because the lyrics speak to me (!).
I love them because they're odd, and because their music's loud.

I say odd, but in terms of odd, they're not ODD odd. They're pop music odd, which means having big hair. And they've definitely gotten less weird, when you compare their most recent album, "The Bedlam in Goliath", with their last collection of what could be loosely termed songs, "Amputechture". Everything on this CD's much more poppy, especially the first five songs. The first single, "Wax Simulacra" is two and a half minutes long. Two and a half minutes!! They of "Cassandra Gemini" fame, which was so extremely long they had to split it into eight parts. "Wax Simulacra" is one of the best things about this CD, which is the first Volta album to have nothing over ten minutes on it.

The first five tracks are amongst the best that Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (too many hyphens!!!) have ever produced. "Goliath", which appears one of Omar's solo albums as a jazzy and inappropriately titled piece called "Rapid Fire Tollbooth", is a monster, with wah-wah licks lain over the top of funky distorted rhythm stabs. Yeah. I just said that. I don't know what the hell it means, but i wrote it.
When "Goliath" finishes, though, everything seems to slow down. If the album was a concert by the group, it's as if the audience had all feinted, and the last eight songs on the album represent the band leaving the stage with their instruments still plugged in. Sick analogy. What I'm trying to get across is that by the start of "Tourniquet Man", at least by the Mars Volta standards, the album starts to suck in a big way.

Case in point: "Askepios". Terrible. It's a slowed-down car crash, with Cedric warbling like some... warbly thing... and they even use that noise that comes from a guitar amp when a mobile phone rings near it. Pointless, and totally weird for the sake of weird.

So, if you download this puppy from itunes, do yourself a favour. Delete the last hour or so from the album. You'll have one of the best EPs ever released, and then you can go on Mars Volta fan forums and speculate wildly until the next one comes out.

A video, ladies and gents, of my favourite song from the album, "Goliath":
(they're not really playing it... Omar's playing a violin, for god's sake, and cedric rarely dresses as a leper unless he has to)