Reuniting for new music for the first time in 10 years,
the progressive-psych-alternative band, The Mars Volta, surprised fans and
critics alike with a focused collection of 14 new tracks that play through in just
under 45 minutes. Devotees of the band and frequent rock concertgoers of the ‘00s
will remember The Mars Volta as an experimental, unpredictable group that often
presented their dense songs of mammoth length in arrangements that made them
even longer and denser on stage. The volatility within the group led to heavy
turnover among supporting musicians and eventually a rift between the primary duo
at the center of the project: vocalist, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, and guitarist,
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, 30-year veterans of the American punk and underground rock scenes
as members of several other bands, most notably, At the Drive-In. While the
pair continued to collaborate on other recordings and tours for other projects
over the last decade, only now have they decided to resurrect what may be their
most beloved and infamous group. However, rather than the spacey, sometimes
almost aimless or chaotically unfocused psychedelic fusion jams featured on
their 6 previous, excellent albums, The Mars Volta presents a completely
different approach, both matured and intentionally reigned in, distancing
itself from the band’s back catalog while exploring ways to work their
signature styles into shorter songs with more traditional structures and arrangements.
While not quite a pop album, as Bixler-Zavala has
described the new material, these songs make their points in digestible segments
that play well as a full piece or as individual tracks. They lock into one
another well in sequence, but none overlap or connect to each other across a
track break, and none are longer than 4:13, previously unheard of for a Mars
Volta LP. The band’s trademark inclusion of Latin, Mexican, and salsa
instruments and arrangements continue to weave in and out of the new songs but
now in ways that are more complimentary to the overall tone of the song rather
than contrasting with a distorted guitar freak-out or electronic wall of noise
and affected vocals. “Blacklight Shine,” the album’s opening track and first
single, marries Cuban rhythms and percussion to a prominent bass, an airy
electric guitar, and a mix of Spanish and English lyrics where “Cerulea” and
other songs mostly abandon the surreal, abstract lyrics of the band’s previous
material in place of personal, relatable lyrics more traditionally found in
standard rock songs in most respects. Tracks like “Shore Story,” “Vigil,” “Collapsible
Shoulders,” and “Palm Full of Crux” find the band dipping a toe into trip hop,
working in electronic beats and loops in place of traditional acoustic drums
but, again, in a way the complements the tones of the songs, unlike some of the
more experimental, electronic sections of tracks from the band’s previous
album, 2012’s Noctourniquet, making The Mars Volta probably most
closely-related to that LP over any of the band’s others, but only in that
regard. Gone (for now?) it seems are the days of extended saxophone and trumpet
solos as horns haven’t factored into the band’s material for several album eras
now.
While parts of The Mars Volta recall meeting up
with an old hard-partying friend after a decade to find them (as are we all),
older, more mature, and more experienced, there are still tastes and allusions
to their signature moments from earlier songs. “Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon”
flies by in just over 100 seconds but has a free-form style that contains its
own haunted vibe, partly because it never really establishes itself as a proper
song before it ends and moves on to a completely different tone at the top of
the next track. “No Case Gain” features hip hop rhythms and verses that are
nearly rapped, mixed with a standard rock progression that slips into fuzzy psychedelia
but only for a few measures. A few lyric segments change briefly from concrete
to abstract during a song’s bridge but change back at the top of the next verse
or chorus. The Mars Volta have always featured emotional moments and songs
throughout their albums, but doing so with more focused intention allows the
band to paint different musical pictures than those they have presented in the
past.
The supporting musicians behind Bixler-Zavala and
Rodriguez-Lopez continue to rotate, and this updated version of the band features
new drummer, Willy Rodriguez Quinones, and the return of original bassist, Eva
Gardner, who had not performed with The Mars Volta since 2002. Marcel
Rodriguez-Lopez, the bandleader/guitarist’s brother, reprises his role on
keyboards and synthesizers, and has played with the group since 2003.
Quizzically, after building up the release of the new album with comments about
how it was meant to be the “opposite” of those records, the earliest concert
performances in support of The Mars Volta featured only a few of its
songs and instead focused on selections from the band’s first two albums and a
sprinkling of tracks from the others. Perhaps the focused execution of the new
tracks will lead to live renditions of older songs that are more faithful to
the length and arrangements of their original recorded versions rather than
stretching many of them well past 10 minutes, sometimes in the 20–50-minute
range, leading to a very different live experience and the ability for the band
to play several more songs than usual within the same amount of time. While
some old school fans might balk at such an idea, all artists deserve the
opportunity to evolve, to experiment, and to take their projects in any
direction they may wish. It may turn out to be that The Mars Volta era
was a creative rebirth that led to more great music from a great band who most
assumed was done and gone forever, and that, in itself, makes it exciting and
engaging.
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