Hallucinating to The Mars Volta

Hai!  I'm back from a week working in San Francisco. I apologize for disappearing like that, pls forgive me?

Let's talk about The Mars Volta.

I've never actually been on any sort of hallucinogenic drug trip, but listening to The Mars Volta's new record The Bedlam in Goliath is making me feel like I'm on something.  I've enjoyed their first three albums, but the sounds on this one are even more frantic, distorted, jarring and not-of-this-world than before.  It sounds like rewinding a cassette tape.  Picking up outer space transmissions on a transistor radio.  Car stereo wars.  Free jazz.  Like open mic night on Neptune.  The Mars Volta should replace the band in the cantina scene in Star Wars.

Thanks to my Rhapsody subscription, I'm able to listen to the record without purchasing it, and honestly I'm not sure I need to buy this one.  But I do, as always, salute their brazen, almost kamikaze creativity and mind-blowing stage presence.  And I recommend this record if you need to be out of your comfort zone - or your mind - for a little while.  This time around they just might have drifted out so far on their own sea of inspiration as to be ultimately out of my reach.

Get a load of them performing "Wax Simulacra" on Letterman:

My favorite parts of this video are:

• the brief Bruce Willis cameo (wha?)
• white microphone cord
• Cedric's bangs combed so smooth
• the one camera angled solely to capture the drummer's bad-assery
• walking away with that feeling of "What the hell just happened?"

Buy The Mars Volta's The Bedlam in Goliath.  If you can handle it.

Comments

[Rahul Ganjoo]

Lol - I agree with the hallucinating part. I saw them a while back at the Oakland arena when they opened for RHCP and the energy they bought was insane. Volta are the strangest mixture of Floyd meet radiohead on steroids.

[marc cartagena]

you guys are lame, their new cd isnt weird at all. i dont get it, what exactly is so out of this world about it? the last 5 minutes of frances the mute is pretty out of this world, take drugs to that.

[Paul Beville]

Every new Mars Volta album is more chaotic than the last. Consequently, each one becomes a little harder to understand. The author of this article should have given the album a few more listens before deeming it unnecessary to purchase. The drummer's intricate snare/bass patterns and odd-timed beats make this album worth getting. Just trying to follow it will put you in a trance. That, along with the jazz-fusion inspired chord progressions and riffs, could make "Bedlam in Goliath" a seemingly hallucinogenic experience. Not simply sound effects.