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