the mars volta

back when i was writing about music with some degree of commitment, i spent several years listening to the same record over and over and over again. after awhile, it grew tiresome. this is one reason why i missed out on at the drive in: it just so happened that the relationship of command arrived laden with the requisite mc5 comparisons at precisely the moment when that was the one thing i _didn't_ want to hear. (coming out of some club the next-to-last time i was at sxsw, some street team guy pressing his band's cd-r into my hand -- _not_ at the drive in's -- and assuring me it "sounds just like the mc5." "oh, christ," i remember thinking, "not _another one_.") i wouldn't even buy the album when i saw multiple copies of it at cd warehouse for a buck.

so now omar rodriguez-lopez and cedric bixler-zavala (great names!) have a band called the mars volta, and they're stupendous. a couple of years ago, an obnoxious kid who took my part-time employment with the local alt-weekly rag as license to impose his latest enthusiasm on me anytime we were in the same bar ("what do you mean you never heard interpol? what do you mean you never heard franz ferdinand? what kind of music critic _are_ you, anyway?") dropped their name, which was another surefire way of guaranteeing i _wouldn't_ go out of my way to check 'em out. my loss.

try as they might to dodge the prog bullet, it's a fair cop. which is fine: complexity and, uh, good musicianship are no sin, even in rock/rawk, as long as they're deployed in service of some value other than "look at me! look at me!" show[boat]manship, and the mars volta play much harder (one man's aggression is another's passion) than yr average band of twee limeys singing about the lord of the rings or something. on their new cd, frances the mute (apparently some kind of "concept album," but i haven't bothered to read the lyrics yet, and half of the songs are sung in spanish), passages of battering percussion-and-gtr firepower rub shoulders with string sections and spacey electronica. there's even some salsa, with real-life fania all-star larry harlow along for the ride, and towards the end, the ghost of john coltrane ca. ascension puts in an appearance. (a couple of red hot chili peppers also check in.) heady stuff, dude.