Mars Volta - Psycho-Progressive Acrobatics

If there's one thing that can never be held against the Rodriguez-López/Bixler-Zavala duo, it's a lack of courage. Over the past five years, between main and side projects, they've never once rested on their laurels. Rather, these two artists of intricate Puerto Rican descent have constantly thrown their listeners off balance, losing some devoted fans along the way while possibly winning over new ones.

Excessive ambition, the urge to do more, to be everywhere at once - something we might as well call presumption - has recently driven them into artistic disarray, an involution that could prove rather difficult to escape.

But let's take things in order. Backstory: At The Drive-In, the reference band from El Paso, Texas, split up noisily at the peak of their career, right after wrapping up the tour for the excellent Relationship Of Command. The band's ranks included visionary singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-López, future founders of Mars Volta.

At The Drive-In thus split into two camps, with the remaining three musicians, led by Jim Ward, taking refuge in Sparta, an emo-core project echoing their former band.

The artistic differences between the two camps would turn out to be directly proportional to the music each would go on to make with the two new bands born from the breakup of At The Drive-In.

Mars Volta — the name borrowed from Fellini — came into being with the ambition of attempting the unattempted, and with Alex Newport behind the production desk, they immediately put out an EP of barely twenty minutes that hinted, in the truest sense of the phrase, that music had changed; the search for a style of their own was built more on the enthusiasm of the two founders than on elaborate foundations worked out with obsessive care. Improvisation is fundamental to Mars Volta, for better or worse, depending on how their instincts panned out.

On the EP Tremulant, drummer Jon Theodore soon earns a starring role, able to lay down constantly unpredictable time signatures (steering well clear of the usual 4/4) that stitch together Omar's otherwise disjointed parts. On bass, for the first and only time, is Eva Gardner, who also turns in a more-than-decent performance. Also crucial is the sonic carpet laid down by keyboardist Isaiah Owens, who effectively stands in for rhythm guitar in the band's sound, without ever overindulging in showy virtuosity. Credit is also due to Jeremy Ward, the band's sixth member and Jim's cousin (who had since moved on to Sparta), who handled digital sound manipulation in the studio and, on stage, sat behind the mixing desk playing the role of King Crimson's Sinfield.

The three tracks making up this short EP foreshadow the structures of the first full-length, which wouldn't arrive until 2003, after a tour supporting Red Hot Chili Peppers. It's Flea himself who replaces Eva Gardner on bass for the recording of the new album, putting himself entirely at the band's service and setting aside his trademark funky style. The album takes the form of a kind of rock opera dedicated to the life and times of Julio Venegas, a young artist and friend of Bixler-Zavala who, having come out of a coma after an accident or an excessive dalliance with drugs, chooses to go back into that state in order to relive the sensations and visions he had during his hospitalization (though in truth there are numerous interpretations of the album's plot, none of them truly definitive).

Production duties on the album, titled De-Loused In The Comatorium, are handed to guru Rick Rubin, and they're in line with his overloaded, redundant productions of recent years (particularly from "Californication" onward), a world away from the stripped-down approach that made the producer famous in the first place. Where Tremulant still sounded raw and dirty, still tethered to At The Drive-In, Rubin definitively cuts those ties and relaunches the band toward a fuller, more multifaceted sound.

The record hasn't even come out yet when the band faces its first crisis: Jeremy Ward is found dead of an overdose in his apartment, leaving a void that would remain unfilled for a long time within Mars Volta, and within De Facto, the dub side-project of the band's members.

De-Loused In The Comatorium comes out on Gold Standard Label (actually distributed by major label Universal) in the summer of 2003, and is met with both positive reviews and fierce criticism: the band is divisive from the very start. The urge to take risks while still nodding clearly to early-Seventies progressive rock (Yes, Van Der Graaf Generator, among others) proves too much for more traditional rock listeners, and a gift from heaven for those who'd long been waiting for another great progressive-rock band.

In truth, Mars Volta's style is quite distinctive and hard to pin on any other specific band, but despite the punk approach and the aforementioned improvisational streak, it's clear that songs with structures that are, if not complex, at least unusual for the period — like "Take The Veil" or the never-ending "Cicatriz Esp" (whose middle section recalls the sonic labyrinth of King Crimson's "Moonchild") — can certainly be called progressive. A healthy dose of psychedelia, courtesy of Bixler-Zavala's highly personal habit of coining new words, combined with the conceptual shape of the rock opera, puts to rest any remaining doubt about how to categorize the band.

The album manages to fuse psychedelia with hardcore, never giving up the chase for epic melodies reached after intricate passages and wildly dynamic verses. Case in point is "Roulette Dares," whose chorus arrives summoned by a pompous, solemn guitar riff, as if it had been pulled straight from Brian May's fretboard. The sonic landscape of "Televators" is quite different, a postmodern slow number in which Cedric Bixler-Zavala's voice carries the entire melody. That voice stays at extremely high pitches throughout the record, helped along by vocal effects that push the tone even higher: live, the Mars Volta frontman can hardly sustain such heights, a sign that the voice, already thin to begin with, was probably recorded and then played back by computer at a faster speed to achieve the effect. Where there's a trick there's a bit of deception, but listeners don't seem to have minded much: artifice is perhaps just the means of reaching certain sensibilities.

With De-Loused In The Comatorium, Mars Volta put themselves forward as one of the best rock acts of the moment, earning widespread respect and poaching fans disillusioned with System Of A Down and Muse (of whom Mars Volta might even be considered the polished, more successful version), while also winning over prog revivalists. They will probably never reach the status of a defining band of their era, nor — especially in light of what came next — the quality and artistic depth of a band like Tool, but De-Loused In The Comatorium is certainly a landmark rock opera for the simple, never trivial fact that it offers a unique style, one that's probably impossible to replicate. Mars Volta pulled off their feat with their very first album: creating something personal and getting audiences to embrace it. Not everyone can manage that.

There's barely time to catch a breath before, several months ahead of its release — perhaps thanks to a shrewd marketing strategy — the second chapter of the saga starts circulating online in advance. The album is called Frances The Mute (2005), and it too is a rock opera of still highly dubious meaning, even though fans have racked their brains over far-fetched interpretations.

What's unsettling isn't really the album's tracklist, which is clearly built around prog-style suites, but rather the sonic collage put together by Rodriguez-López's own production: in several places the album comes across as a cut-and-paste of disconnected sketches forcibly stuck together, in a kind of synthetic cubism made of papiers collés drawn from wildly different sources. The focus is no longer on melody or the songs' unstoppable rhythm, but on half-formed ideas that surface and then get abandoned here and there throughout the record, which on the whole disappoints critics as well as a good chunk of day-one fans.

The Latin American fascination comes to the fore in "L'Via L'Viaquez," where at least the idea isn't an end in itself, but points back to something lived through, and perhaps suffered through, in reality. Less successful is the patchwork of segments that makes up "Cassandra Geminni," roughly thirty minutes of chaos that's anything but inspired or coherent. Even on the album's one somewhat conventionally structured track, "The Widow," Mars Volta lose the comparison with their own recent past ("Televators," specifically).

There's also the title track, released on the back of the "The Widow" single, which adds little to the picture of an album in which Mars Volta drop the mask, revealing their progressive ambitions while remaining prisoners of their own pretensions in a fruitless act of self-sabotage.

More improvisation, combined with less than a handful of older songs, is what's on offer on the live album Scabdates, a record most found disappointing, whose only merit is capturing scattered flashes of the energy the band can unleash on stage. In any case, it's a thoroughly premature and negligible live album from a band that seems to have lost its best ideas, chasing a dream of grandeur that has pushed them into an uncontrollable decline.

In 2006 a new work finally arrives, with John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on guitar for much of the record, once again recorded in a rush during the final dates of the Frances The Mute tour. But doubts already arise over the necessity of bringing in a Frusciante who by now is more of an out figure than an artist worthy of the attention he gets, especially after his return as savior of the nation on "Californication".

In essence, it will come down to either witnessing a more or less concrete artistic comeback for the Rodriguez-López/Bixler-Zavala duo, or putting ourselves in the shoes of Daedalus, retrieving the body of Icarus who, in his hunger for greatness, drowned at sea after burning his wings in flight by flying too close to the sun.

There's barely time to catch one's breath after the plunge into the psychotic, relentlessly visionary progressive rock of Frances The Mute, before the Rodriguez-López/Bixler Zavala duo churns out the third chapter of the Mars Volta saga (the fourth, if you count the entirely negligible live album Scabdates), a saga that began amid great fanfare and may now be headed for a miserable epilogue, given the recent departure of drummer Jon Theodore, who until now had been the true beating heart of the band, able to wrap the other musicians' performances around himself and give direction to the otherwise chaotic ideas of the group's two leader-brains.

Amputechture (2006) unsurprisingly presents itself as another lofty opus magnum, replicating its predecessor's blueprint and renewing the challenge to formulaic rock in the name of improvisation and irrationality. In truth, it's an album that amplifies and chases more than one idea buried in the sonic chaos of Frances The Mute, but which fails miserably at any of its stated goals.

The record, which features the sizeable yet oddly anonymous contribution of John Frusciante – not a single idea in the whole album worthy of his illustrious, by now distant past – under the watchful eye of his friend Omar Rodriguez-López, who has set himself up as director for the occasion, opens with an improbable ode to the moon: on "Vicarious Atonement" Cedric Bixler Zavala follows the excessively pathos-laden notes of the electric guitar by channeling Robert Plant for over seven interminable and pointless minutes of gratuitous tedium. Across the whole record, made up of eight tracks, there are three songs with no percussion whatsoever, for a total of roughly twenty-three minutes of music without Theodore behind the kit – a likely sign that friction or internal problems within the band had begun well before this album was recorded, making it fair to wonder whether its release was really necessary, or simply premature. It's ultimately the same doubt many had about the overflowing excess of the previous album, which certainly put too much raw meat on the table.

The interesting ideas that had fascinated prog devotees are nevertheless present on Amputechture too, particularly on "Tetragrammaton", which – before getting lost in overflowing lyricism and falsettos – condenses, so to speak, given that it runs over fifteen minutes, this incarnation of Mars Volta's stylistic solutions into a single track, solutions that are certainly a far cry from At The Drive-In, but also from the sharper ideas put forward on De-Loused In The Comatorium. It's from that latter record that "Vermicide" seems to draw, the only track here that is roughly conventional in form yet fully successful, technically the opposite of the progressive suites (or messes?) of "Meccamputechture" and "Days Of The Baphomets", where it would have been far more useful to isolate the melodically interesting parts and build around them songs that, while perhaps just as long, were more focused.

The album's theme is the depiction of religious illumination, whatever form it may take, and thus an almost Kandinsky-like pursuit of the spiritual in art; it's curious to note how, for a subject that invites reflection and meditative stillness – one that over the years has been handled successfully by countless artists across every genre and subgenre of contemporary music – Mars Volta instead rely on studio improvisation and an enormous array of instrumentation that they inevitably fail to fully shape and control themselves.

The references to certain strands of esotericism and occultism (partly borrowed from Tool's lexicon, and not only Keenan's, at that) scattered here and there also come across as sloppy and well past their sell-by date, feeling more like a decoy than anything substantial: there is in fact no evidence of any genuine spiritual search on Bixler Zavala's part, who incidentally proves far more captivating when singing in Spanish, as in the heartfelt lines of "Asilos Magdalena".

The ghost of Muse hovers – though honestly never taking over – around the single "Viscera Eyes", which nonetheless stays at a decent level of inspiration throughout, while "El Cervo Vulnerado" – perhaps purely as a nod – borrows its title from one of the best-known works by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, echoing a little of the stagnant mood from the opening of "Vicarious Atonement", thereby closing the loop on a work that at first glance seems to call for the same slow dissection and absorption as its predecessor, but which ultimately leaves the impression of being inconclusive and premature.

Any reappraisal some might make of Frances The Mute is almost predictable at this point – and, in that case, mistaken – given that Amputechture sharply diminishes the weight and artistic status Mars Volta had built up over the previous two years.

Mars Volta try again a little over a year later with The Bedlam In Goliath, which brings Omar and his band back onto more conventional tracks. If we're being honest, Cedric Bixler Zavala works hard to nauseate the unsuspecting listener with his falsettos and sudden high notes, often filtered through effects reminiscent of early-'90s arcade video games. When the vocal acrobatics settle down, there's room for moments of real class and good taste, like the fine arrangement of "Soothsayer", worthy of the most romantic King Crimson: one of the best moments in the band's whole discography.

The most interesting part of the record is the closing trio of tracks, where there's also a marked slowdown in tempo and, with it, in the tribal drive brought by new drummer Thomas Pridgen, an equally feral replacement for the ousted Jon Theodore. The young drummer's talent seems to rely a little too heavily on ride/crash cymbals, which inevitably drown out details in the rich undergrowth of sound, particularly Juan Alderete's prolific bass work.

The track lengths are more contained than usual, but there's no shortage of the band's beloved digressions: "Cavallettas" even includes a flute passage à la Jethro Tull that, given their track record, is barely surprising anymore; "Metatron" seems guilty of the same mistakes made on Amputechture. What does work, on the other hand, is the danceable, Latin-flavored groove of "Ilyena", and above all the solemn close of opener "Aberinkula".

The Bedlam In Goliath confirms Mars Volta as a band still very much alive in 2008, yet it lacks the element of surprise that, for better or worse, jolted anyone encountering their music for the first time. Paradoxically, for an album meant to mark a relaunch, this new offering from the Omar & Cedric partnership might end up being the one that marks the end of the duo's revolutionary dreams.

The unstoppable urge to churn out albums, long a hallmark of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's solo career, now seems to have definitively spread to the Mars Volta project as well, which just a year after The Bedlam In Goliath delivers its fifth full-length to record stores. Given its short runtime and sound very similar to its predecessor, Octahedron could almost be mistaken for a collection of leftovers from that album – ones that would certainly have made its already massive bulk even heavier. That's borne out by the quality of a few somewhat self-referential tracks ("Desperate Graves", the furious lead single "Cotopaxi", "Copernicus"), which rather than reshaping the band's chameleon-like formula into something new, simply follow in its footsteps without much effort.

The opening ballad “Since We’ve Been Wrong” and the delicate neo-folk/prog atmosphere of “With Twilight As My Guide” are the only two convincing (and why not, moving) moments on a release that's torn between solid craftsmanship — the band's winning trait, never entirely a failure to this day — and the artistic listlessness of a group that, despite having no real need to sell more records, seems eager to hastily pad out its discography and keep a constant “stage presence” in front of its audience. One sincerely hopes that Octahedron is just a minor step in the unusual musical history of Rodriguez-Lopez and co., and in the talent of a band that there's (still) no reason to doubt.

In 2012 the band ups its stock with Noctourniquet, an album in which they finally manage to define the traits of their new course, blending catchiness and jaggedness in equal measure.

Having replaced drummer David Elitch with old “friend” Deantoni Parks, the two leaders Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala thus raise their heads again, showing a willingness to experiment with new sonic paths, putting together yet another anthology of apotheoses and sudden crashes, incapable, as ever, of being banal and predictable.

For this new effort, Cedric had fun coining the term “future punk,” and it could even work, if only one could avoid thinking of the wild visceral nature of that '77 genre and its original distance from the complex elucubrations of prog. And yet, Mars Volta are what they are also, and above all, because of their daring combinations, their willingness to take risks without overthinking it. In short, “Noctourniquet” doesn't deny what the band has been, it simply moves on to a new level.

The angular rhythms and synth blasts of “The Whip Hand” thus open the dance, catapulting us into a futuristic scenario (fittingly enough...), one kept intact by tracks such as “Lapochka,” “Dyslexicon” (where the electronics conceal rage, imposing its visionary charge), by the psychedelic abstractions of “In Absentia” and by the title track itself, an emblem of the ongoing balancing act between the stratosphere of ambition and the solid ground of a more conventional melodicism (theirs, of course...).

What stands out most is Cedric's will to expand/redefine the role of his voice: a voice that's always flexible, but here decidedly “softer,” more controlled, in short “mature,” though not without those falsetto flourishes that sometimes sound a bit out of place. Listen to it on hyperspace ballads like “Empty Vessels Make The Loudest Sound,” “Vedamalady” (whose intro brings to mind that of “Baba O'Riley” by the Who) or in that excellent blend of reggae ghosts and post-punk shadows that is “The Malkin Jewel,” and you'll get the full sense of the operation, poised between beguiling, melancholic romanticism and chameleonic touches.

In the second half of the album, especially toward the end, the inspiration starts to wane (with low points such as, for instance, “Trinkets Pale Of Moon,” or at least confused moments like “Zed And Two Naughts”), amid plenty of craft but little real substance.

At the start of 2013, though, comes the cold shower: an outburst, more than an official announcement, through which, from his Twitter profile, Cedric Bixler Zavala announced the breakup of Mars Volta. A long, rapid-fire series of tweets, in which the Californian band's singer makes his position very clear, sparing no attacks on co-founder Omar Rodríguez-López, accused of having scattered the energy the band needed across other projects.

Squabbles that dragged on for a while, gradually smoothed over, as was only natural, to the point of bringing the duo back together first with the 2014 Antemasque project, then again with the At The Drive-In reunion, documented by the 2017 album “In•ter a•li•a.”

It was only a matter of time, then, and so, ten years on, the long-awaited reunion finally comes to light. The Mars Volta (2022), a decidedly emblematic self-titled album, marks the official return of the El Paso duo, and it's a genuinely disorienting one. The result is comparable to what happened with their full-length debut, when they obliterated every trace of post-hardcore with De-Loused In The Comatorium, which in 2003 left followers stunned, surprised to find no sign of continuity with the aggressive repertoire of the past.

Their inimitable blend of flavors remains a clear trademark, but it's undeniable that across the fourteen tracks making up this surprising reunion, the marks of maximum accessibility are quite plain to see, and not just because of the song lengths, which almost never exceed four minutes, or the presence of verse-and-chorus structures in nearly every track.

The great thing is that it all seems to work brilliantly.

The parts sung in English and Spanish by Bixler-Zavala (who, as usual, also wrote the lyrics, themselves subtly more direct than in the past) are no longer relegated to second place, but are placed on equal footing with the instrumental parts devised by the ever-masterful Rodríguez-López, excellently assisted by his brother Marcel (synthesizers and percussion), Eva Gardner on bass, and the virtuoso Willy Rodriguez Quiñones on drums.

In the lead singles “Blacklight Shine” and “Graveyard Love,” the arrangements steered by Rodríguez-López retain a strong Latin-tinged influence that overrides the properly rock instrumentation, and while on one hand there's a clear simplification of the harmonic structures, on the other it seems the duo still wants to pack all the flair that has always set them apart into an extremely short running time. A decidedly significant and compelling (calculated?) risk.

The third lead single is “Vigil,” the least lively of the three since it's sparing with succulent ideas, but things bounce back emphatically with “Blank Condolences,” a three-and-a-half-minute cut that could serve as an absolute reference point for how to frame today's art-pop, an enticing track that, between off-kilter percussion, elegant synth lines and guitar flourishes, rises among the standout pieces on the tracklist.

The highlights are numerous: "Cerulea", which boasts the most commanding chorus on the whole album, the sixties folk-prog of "Palm Full Of Crux", complete with mellotron and a menacing refrain, the airy acoustics of "Tourmaline", and the quirky yet tasty ups and downs of "Flash Burns From Flashbacks" and "No Case Gain" — the latter a track that, in just under three minutes, runs through shifts of key and genre without ever sounding pretentious or disjointed.

Mars Volta have made a reassuring, if divisive, record, one that nonetheless brims with class and quality. There isn't a single track that feels like an end in itself, because the underlying concept tying "The Mars Volta" together steers clear, this time, of any forced ambition toward exploration and experimentation.

This new incarnation of the band is the polar opposite of the previous one, yet it's capable of delivering a record that — if we may put it this way about Omar and Cedric — comes across as more accessible and, if you will, more ordinary, while still staying well above the average.

A few months later, in April 2023, Omar and Cedric put forward yet another unusual, boldly ambitious release.

In Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon, the thirteen tracks that made up the self-titled album from 2022 are completely reworked in an acoustic key, with strong Latin overtones that clearly nod to the two artists' roots.

Take the title track, for example, a song that perfectly illustrates the stylistic strategy behind the whole project. An off-kilter salsa groove, which had already peeked through in the original arrangement, is here broadened to embrace all the most danceable Caribbean flavors.

In technical phrasing of this kind, percussion is bound to take a leading role: congas, clave, timbales, tambourines, djembes and bongos trade places alongside the constructions driven by Rodriguez-Lopez's acoustic guitar, and at times by piano too ("Shore Story").

Tracks such as "Blank Condolences" and "Equus 3" are rearranged over asynchronous rhythms, irregularly cut through by horns, digital strings and mellotron, handled by Omar himself and his younger brother Marcellus, alongside touches of double bass from Eva Gardner — contributors who round out a sonic framework dripping with passion, and only apparently more stripped-down than the original versions.

Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon is yet another bold display of the art Mars Volta have been unfurling, ever further from what made them a long-standing reference point, yet no less daring in presenting, with full personality, their current artistic and communicative vision.

With Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacío (2025), uncharted territory isn't reserved for them alone anymore. The fusion of enveloping electronics and progressive labyrinths the album offers genuinely breaks new ground, making it unique even beyond the always-recognizable personality running through the expanded band's output.

The murky synths of "Cue The Sun" have a sound you'd more readily expect from Alessandro Cortini working with Nine Inch Nails or from Radiohead, yet they carry a melodic tension as jagged and visceral as anything produced by Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala, steering the result away from any predictability. On "The Iron Rose" the synthetic textures are, if anything, even more menacing and mutable: a glacial, saturating, pervasive blanket that at times seems to liquefy in real time. And floating, piercing, pearlescent keyboards also dominate the closing "Lucro Sucio", intertwining with jazzy piano movements to shape an eclectic, disorienting inlay.

Even though this is a surprisingly quiet and restrained record for anyone familiar with the band's history, there are tracks where the angrier, more hyperkinetic Mars Volta resurface in watermark. On "Reina Tormenta", electronics pushed right to the fore aren't an obstacle but a springboard for reinventing their familiar alien fusion of Latin rhythms, oblique jazz-rock trajectories, and enigmatic, razor-sharp, heavily effected verses. And psychedelic-jazz weaves, built on hypnotic basslines and Rhodes arpeggios, return to center stage on "Celaje", whose shapeshifting flow sways between thickening and thinning textures, between abrupt emptying-outs and incursions of organ, horns, mellotron-like beds, and overexcited drums.

"Alba del orate", halfway between old and new, perhaps sums up the sense of this metamorphosis better than any other track: an old identity resurfacing within an entirely different musical form, less frantic but just as restless. The song dusts off the guitar — almost absent elsewhere — letting its most distorted tones collide with the flickering of detuned synths. "Un disparo al vacío", on the other hand, slightly disappoints expectations, playing the Afro-Cuban all-in card, only to do an about-face midway through the track, cutting short the rhythmic developments of montuno and tumbao just before they can burst into a new "L'Via L'Viaquez".

Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacío is a record that reopens the creative workshop of Mars Volta with more ideas than certainties, but finally without filters: fragmented, captivating, in transit — and all the more intriguing precisely because it still feels like just a first step.

Contributions by Michele Palozzo ("Octahedron"), Francesco Nunziata ("Nocturniquet"), Cristiano Orlando ("The Mars Volta" and "Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon"), Marco Sgrignoli ("Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacío")

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