For those accustomed to the band’s signature sound, it is a mostly pleasant experience. Other than that, however, most of the problems with the album are minor. Of course, when that’s your chorus, that just emphasizes the problem. But when singing softly in a normal tone, lines like “My devil makes me dream/Like no other mortal dreams/With a blank eye corner” stick out, and not in a good way.
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When the band is in full force, Bixler-Zavala screaming nonsensical nouns and verbs strung together through rambling spanglish is completely acceptable, even welcome. Of course, understandable has never been a positive description for The Mars Volta, and it can easily work against them, as on “With Twilight As My Guide”, a ballad which drags not only on dull instrumentation but on some of the worst lyrics ever penned by anyone ever. Whether they are exhausted from playing hour-long jam sessions on extended world tours or they wanted to give listeners a break is unclear, but the move is definitely noticeable, and adds to the overall presentation by making it easier to wrap one’s mind around the song structures. For the first time in the band’s career, none of the album’s eight tracks breaks ten minutes in length. The whole album is probably the closest the band will ever come to a quiet acoustic record, which is to say that Thomas Pridgen’s masterful drum work is mostly mixed down and appears sparingly as opposed to plowing through every breathing second of their last album, and Bixler-Zavala drops his vocal screeching to a more manageable register (again, most of the time).
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In a twist, the band has risen from their self-made hard rock explosion with a regained appreciation of the slow melodic ballads that dotted their first two albums so successfully. So now, the band returns with the latest dip into this reportedly vast musical vault, and the results are certainly unexpected, if not entirely captivating. Unfortunately, however, this was the time that most mainstream music critics began to turn on the band. 2008’s The Bedlam in Goliath did manage to bring back some of the surprise and promise of the band’s early work, with moments of staggering intensity littered throughout an overall solid piece of work (also notably the first time the production managed to capture the raw power of the drums, which was a definite plus). 2006’s Amputecture showed little of the subtlety and nuance of its predecessors, and failed to inspire most listeners. On the bad side, they ran the risk of falling into patterns, no longer stretching themselves or their instruments with the same power or creativity. On the good side, the band could comfortably keep a strong momentum and keep their profile high for years to come. What this did for the band was create a definite good news, bad news situation. Basically, he’d crafted enough material to last the band through the end of the decade and beyond, presumably without having to write another note. Somehow, Rodriguez-Lopez, who also produces and composes most of the music, managed to write enough material, he claimed, for several albums. Then the band’s path took a strange turn.
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And for all the experimental weirdness and highly challenging sonic bombasts, critics and fans mostly appreciated the band for what it was and gave them free reign.
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On these records, they showcased their abilities to rock (and rock HARD) but also to mellow out, as on their only hit single to date, “The Widow”. Beginning as a splinter group (along with Sparta) from the vastly overrated At The Drive-In, guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala began by crafting two almost perfect albums: The slow-building and subtly brilliant De-loused in the Comatorium and the mind-bending, extreme Frances the Mute. The Mars Volta have had a career path that’s almost as strange as their music, and that’s certainly saying something.