Vooraf even dit: ik ken de band vooral van de albums De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003) en Frances the Mute (2005), had het dan een beetje gehad en ben hen helemaal uit het oog verloren. Wat niet zo'n groot verlies was, bleek achteraf. Plots zijn ze er terug, na een afwezigheid van tien jaar, met hun zevende album, voor het gemak The Mars Volta getiteld. Wie echter die hyper kinetische, op een lappendeken van sounds trippende band uit de beginjaren verwacht, die is eraan voor de moeite. Al moet ik toegeven dat ik, na het her beluisteren van Frances the Mute toch héél veel elementen uit die periode herken, zij het dan allemaal op een kick back and relax manier gebracht.
Verklaar me voor gek wanneer ik deze release met één van hun meesterwerken vergelijk? Luister dan maar eens naar L'Via L'Viaquez, focus op de twee rustige intermezzo's en denk gewoon het gitaargeweld weg: JIAR (de betekenis hiervan wordt dit najaar duidelijk!). Toegegeven, dat is ook wel het enige nummer waarmee ik een vergelijk kan trekken. Cruise echter even door héél hun backcatalogue (voor wie stalen zenuwen heeft) en je ontdekt geleidelijk aan alle verschillende elementen die aanwezig waren en die nu verweven zitten in de nummers op dit 'pop album'. Noem het gerust fusion cooking want TMV (band) putte voor haar al dan niet moeilijk verteerbare maaltijden steeds uit diverse ingrediënten. Die gingen - en gaan ook nu - telkens van knalharde rock over prog en jazz tot salsa en andere Latin invloeden. Sorry, laat in dit geval 'knalharde' maar weg en voeg daar een scheut soul en pop aan toe en je krijgt TMV (het album).
Het heeft wel even geduurd alvorens ik het kon vatten. Helemaal verbaasd was ik toen ik de eerste singles Blacklight Shine, Graveyard Love en Vigil hoorde. Van helemaal van mijn melk tot eens goed lachen, dat effect hadden de songs op me, lees het er zelf maar even op na. Het begon echter allemaal op zijn plaats te vallen en ik voelde meer en meer de fantastische vibe, ontdekte de vele subtiele elementen en geniet al een hele week van vooral de eerste helft van het album. Naast de eerder uitgebrachte nummers zijn vooral het soulvolle Shore Story en het Latin triphop pareltje Blank Condolences om van te snoepen. Volgt een erg korte uitstap richting Santana, de proggy versie en opnieuw zeemzoete soul die zo van Bruno Mars had kunnen zijn. Van 'kort' gesproken: op twee na gaat geen enkel nummer over de vier minuten en toch hoor en beleef je veel, zij het op een chille manier.
Het wordt dan voor mijn smaak even iets minder, vooral de postpunkinvloeden in No Case Gain zijn helemaal mijn ding niet en lijken wel de vreemde eend in de bijt. Dit is slechts een klein dipje, want het ingetogen en folky Tourmaline stuurt ons naar een overheerlijke finale barstensvol chille variatie. De heren Rodríguez-López en Bixler-Zavala hebben dan misschien wel een pop album afgeleverd, maar het is er eentje dat zo rijk aan diverse invloeden en subtiele vondsten is, dat dit wel eens het perfecte pop album voor hun trouwe fans zou kunnen zijn.
Releasedatum: 16 september 2022
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Rodríguez-López approached Bixler-Zavala with this new music and informed his partner that he wanted to make “a heavy record”. Bixler- Zavala chuckles and says that if he told anyone else that, “they’d assume we were about to turn into Sunn 0))) or Sleep”. But Rodríguez- López and Bixler-Zavala have a bond beyond most, and the singer imme- diately caught the guitarist/composer’s inference. Rodríguez-López’s timing was perfect. Weathering unthinkable tensions and traumas that had left him intimately conversant with just how dark, twisted and painful life could get, Bixler-Zavala was ready to pen the words and vocal melodies to deliver the “heavy record” the guitarist/composer had in mind. “It’s therapy,” Bixler-Zavala says. “And I’m lucky enough to have someone like Omar in my life, to spearhead that and make it all happen. His patience and tenacity are so key to all this. I’m constantly in awe of how he does shit.”
So The Mars Volta is the group’s “pop” album – a malleable term, especially in the hands of artistic revolutionaries like Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala. Still, listen close, to the darkly lilting bustle of Backlight Shine, to the needling, paranoid throb of Graveyard Love, the resonant, wracked choruses of Vigil, Cedric’s anguished howl of “Leave no man be- hind” on Collapsible Shoulders... Built upon traditional structures, bearing bright hooks, bold choruses, melodies your brain will try to unravel in your sleep, the songs of The Mars Volta are, undeniably, pop songs.
Received wisdom has it that such songs should be in opposition to the music The Mars Volta have typically made, but The Mars Volta is a distillation of everything the group have done before, a focusing of intentions, a sculpting of expression. A common reference point for Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala is Peter Gabriel’s So, the multi-platinumselling, Grammy-nominated album that saw one of rock’s most ex- perimental, progressive and generally uncooperative voices find a way to deliver his avant garde ideas and powerful subversion in a way that main- stream audiences would be able to decode.
The Mars Volta plays a similar game: it is subtly subversive – endlessly inventive, but never at the cost of the song. Many of the same values that made The Mars Volta’s previous albums so groundbreaking, so acclaimed, are still present here, but they are employed in different, adroit ways. The Caribbean rhythms that powered their blistering earlier records still flourish across The Mars Volta – they aren’t the foreground now, but they ripple underneath each of these tracks. Similarly, the big rock moves and proggy complexities of their landmark releases have given way for more sonic subtlety, for immediacy and directness. But while The Mars Volta shies away from Grand Guignol flourishes, it remains a dark, powerful and affecting listen, mature and deeply satisfying in its restraint.
Make no mistake, the music of The Mars Volta is remarkable, a visionary left-turn on the part of the endlessly inventive Rodríguez-López. And even though its understated production invites the listener to hear the big picture and not his painstaking detailing, the album contains breathtaking flourishes around every corner: the swarming synths that envelop Graveyard Love like vines, or the salsa piano and heavy, heavy percussion that lend Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon its irresistible bustle. And don’t underestimate the skill required to deliver such acces- sible, lucid music without suffocating the potent turbulence coursing be- neath.
Early on in the project, Rodríguez-López cut basic demo versions of the songs at home, for Bixler-Zavala to compose lyrics and vocal melo- dies to. He later flew out to California to record Bixler-Zavala’s vocals, using a portable studio where the singer’s head was zipped inside a box while he recorded, to ensure the intimate performances that make The Mars Volta such a riveting, emotional journey (as is often the case with The Mars Volta’s work, the album sees Bixler-Zavala sing rather than scream, and in Spanish as the songs demand). Once the vocal takes were in the can, Rodríguez-López relocated to New York, where he recorded the final versions of the music that composes The Mars Volta, joined by his hand-picked foils: keyboardplayer Marcel Rodríguez-López, bassist Eva Gardner and drummer Willy Rodriguez Quiñones.
The end result is an astonishing, mature album, one that will startle long-time fans of the group, and win them new ears along the way.
The text of The Mars Volta, and the tender, vulnerable way Cedric Bixler-Zavala delivers his lyrics, is a key source of the album’s considerable power. “The most revolutionary thing for us to do was just be very simple and straightforward,” he says, and while this ethos extends to the group’s new music, it also speaks to the words Bixler-Zavala sings. These are songs haunted by absent friends – including the group’s beloved compadre and soundmanipulator Jeremy Michael Ward, a founder member who passed away shortly after the recording of De-Loused In The Comatorium, and whose loss inspires the stunning Palm Full Of Cruxes, which Bixler-Zavala says he penned “as a lighthouse to him, wherever he is”. These are also songs marked by the trauma Bixler-Zavala and his family have experienced in recent years – songs of justified paranoia, of love surmounting unthinkable challenges, of betrayal and noirish subterfuge.
The lyrics are considerably easier to decipher than earlier Mars Volta screeds, the group’s signature lexicon of invented words (many the work of the late Ward) abandoned now in favour of poetic, plain-speaking storytelling. Bickler-Zavala used to love littering his songs with riddles that he knew wouldn’t be decoded until decades after his death. But on The Mars Volta he writes clearly and concisely, his words cutting deeply, his metaphors heavy with portent. On Vigil, perhaps the album’s most un- forgettable track, he sings of lives torn apart by centrifugal forces, a recurring theme throughout. He was thinking specifically of a fairground ride at Western Playland in El Paso, where its spinning movement pins riders to the wall as it gather pace, whether they want it to or not. “I wanted to convey that you might think you have control over your life, but centrifugally speaking, you get what you get when life starts spinning around,” Bixler-Zavala says.
The recent chaos and pain of his life inspired many of these songs, but key among all of them is the connection between Bixler-Zavala and his bandmate, and the inspiration the singer draws from Rodríguez-López music. “Everything I gravitated to that Omar gave me had this ‘end-of- the-movie, credits-are-rolling’ melancholy to it,” he explains. “I was moved to tears by much of it, because it mirrored, sonically and through chordchanges, what I was feeling.”
The Mars Volta marks a profound shift in the group’s sound, a tectonic transference that might unsettle some. Bixler-Zavala, however, is unafraid of the fans’ potential reaction, perhaps trusting in their faith in The Mars Volta’s core duo, and in the power of these new visions. It’s like when Paul Weller split The Jam for The Style Council, he suggests – some fans were thrown initially, but soon recognised the discrete beauty of the new group. More to the point, it’s like when The Mars Volta formed 21 years earlier, their radical divergence from At The Drive-In’s convulsive, propulsive punk initially too much for their more conservative fans to swallow. But The Mars Volta proved a quantum leap ahead from that earlier band, a grander, greater success than they could ever have imagined. And once you’ve lived with The Mars Volta a little, you’ll know this astonishing album will enjoy similar success. The Mars Volta have changed, which is how it is supposed to be, as The Mars Volta was formed and operates as a musical permanent revolution. And The Mars Volta might be their finest album yet, a stunning, brave and powerful left-turn that will draw the faithful along with it, and win over a new audience who could scarcely expect its subtle, understated but compelling charms. Embrace it now, or embrace it later – just know that its sophisticated charms are impossible to resist.
