Mars Volta: The Bedlam in Goliath
Cedric and Omar dazzle on this stunning fourth album.
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Friday, 25, Jan 2008 05:13
Island, out now.
In a nutshell.
Two men's unique musical landscape
What's it all about?
The fourth album from Mars Volta is a thirteen track epic mixed by the man behind the most recent Muse and Interpol full-lengths. A concept album, like its predecessors, The Bedlam In Goliath takes the listener on a journey through the band's experiences of a ouija board.
Who's it by?
The band is rooted in friends Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala (the driving force behind defunct punks At The Drive-In) yet with help also coming from Red Hot Chili Peppers' John Frusciante and other California-based musicians. Having built a reputation around ruptured melodies and wandering rhythms, Mars Volta channel onto tape all the frenetic energy of their mercurial live shows.
As an example...
"I crawl along the ceilings in your room/The cold is spinning thread/To answer you/I need something made of freewill." -Wax Simulacra
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
So far all reputable critics have marked the album with positives but, as far as awards go, the best acts never do win the prizes. Mars Volta's uncompromising attitude to their music makes it a pill the establishment's never likely to swallow.
What the others say
"Compressing dissected time signatures and stammering riffs into seizures that sound like three Mars Voltas going off at once." -Rolling Stone
"The intellectual heavy rock band." -The Observer
So is it any good?
A gem to behold, The Bedlam in Goliath showcases an insight into the best our modern musical tradition has to offer. No longer prog-rock, this is post-modern-rock in the sense that it pays its dues and tips its hat to the greatest musicians of the past. What The Mars Volta carry is a special quality seen so rarely in art (David Lynch has it, Van Gogh has it, in his fiction Gael Garcia Marquez has it): an ability to soak up influence from past generations and regurgitate with unique brilliance an art that stares down the future.
At a point when so much music can too easily been recognised as brazen pastiche we frequently define musicians by how they measure to their predecessors. No such comparisons can be made for Mars Volta. There are tempestuous drums and wrestling guitars, strings and brass and percussion all played out as if to test their breaking point but this is both everything and nothing that has gone before it.
Those who understand will smile discreetly from the back of the room as those who do not attempt to protest their reasons why. But the truth is this is no longer music: this is art to stand beside any other genre.
10/10
Mat Strowbridge