Mars Volta

You can say of pretty much any record that it marks "a before and after," if only in the lives of the people who made it. But for few albums is this as evident as it is for "De-Loused In The Comatorium," at least within progressive rock. Before its release in 2003, the genre was seen as a niche for nostalgics, adored, mocked or taken as inspiration, but far more geared toward reviving Seventies models than exploring new territory. In the wake of the debut by Mars Volta, however, a new wave of bands and fans reignited the progressive flame, with a background only partially tied to seventies glories, and oriented more toward the alternative rock of the Eighties, Nineties and early 2000s. And a combination of ambition, freedom and hybridizing spirit that — more than any other parallel — seemed to hark directly back to what had driven the genre's pioneers.
"De-Loused In The Comatorium" was, in short, to progressive rock in the new millennium what "Sgt. Pepper's," "Stand Up" or "In The Court Of The Crimson King" had been for the genre's original prototype straddling the Sixties and Seventies: a point of no return, the spark that ignited an explosion of creativity and experimentation. If this role is only partially recognized today (Mars Volta are very well known among rock listeners, but are often seen more as a one-off than as the initiators of a rich lineage) it's because the first decade of the 2000s coincided with the definitive fragmentation of fan communities, no longer united by shared cross-cutting reference points and, out of necessity, attentive only to a narrow set of genres and scenes, sometimes mistaken for the whole of the worthwhile landscape.

If the roots of seventies progressive rock are generally traced back to Swinging London, the new prog big bang of the early 2000s was born at the opposite end of the Anglosphere: in El Paso, Texas, a city of six hundred thousand people at the western tip of the state, wedged between Mexico and New Mexico and overwhelmingly populated by people classified in the census as "Hispanic or Latino." Omar Alfredo Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the band's founders and only constant members, are children of Hispanic parents and grew up immersed in Latin American music as well as Anglo-American pop and rock. Rodríguez-López, in particular, recalls that at home "there was salsa and the Beatles, basically." After spending his early years in Puerto Rico and picking up the guitar to the sound of "Electric Harlow" ("maybe the best salsa record of its era," he would later state), his teenage years in El Paso brought him into contact with skater culture, at the time closely tied to the hardcore punk underground: Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Crass, but above all Black Flag. From Greg Ginn's band to King Crimson was a relatively short step, though not an obvious one: "Four years later I was introduced to King Crimson, and again everything collapsed, but in a constructive way. Many of my friends who loved bands like Black Flag hated King Crimson. I found that a mystery. Even today I don't see Black Flag as their diametric opposite. To me it's entirely logical for a Black Flag fan to also love King Crimson."

Rodríguez-López took his first steps as a musician precisely within the hardcore scene, singing for the local band Startled Calf, with whom he embarked on a Californian tour after dropping out of high school in 1991, at age 17. He returned to El Paso after the band split, on the suggestion of his friend Bixler-Zavala, who brought him into his own band, At The Drive-In, a group that within a few years would rise to the top of the post-hardcore scene, even getting some MTV airplay with the now-classic "Relationship Of Command" (1999). Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala had met years earlier and had shared many stages of their musical growth. Listening sessions with friends Julio Venegas (future bassist of Los Dregtones) and Jeremy Ward (sound engineer and trusted "sonic manipulator" for the two from the At The Drive-In days until his death in 2003) were a kind of initiation into more adventurous rock for them: "[The first time we completely lost ourselves in music] was as teenagers, with King Crimson and Velvet Underground records. That's when I learned to surrender completely to sound. To listen so intensely you disconnect from the outside world. Julio and Jeremy would play us that kind of music. We were still punk kids, we only listened to hyper-fast punk rock. Julio and Jeremy would say: 'Sit down and be still for once, and listen to this.'" This approach, as Bixler-Zavala recalled, led the two over time to many shared discoveries. Can and PiL, Captain Beefheart, Syd Barrett, Frank Zappa, ESG, Yes and Magma, Led Zeppelin, Rush, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Hawkwind, the Grateful Dead, Weather Report, Fela Kuti, John Coltrane and Miles Davis, King Tubby, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Brainiac, the Butthole Surfers, Throbbing Gristle... A breadth of horizons that perhaps stayed somewhat in the background with At The Drive-In (though it became quite noticeable on the band's later records), and which Mars Volta instead turned into an explosive driving force.

Another thing Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala had in common was their relationship with drugs. Opiates, in particular. These too played a decisive role in the story of their bands. "All I did was shoot heroin," Rodríguez-López recounted of the period before his return to El Paso. "I sold my guitar. I sold everything. I called Cedric, I wanted to go home. That's how I ended up joining At The Drive-In." That was 1995. Six years later, the band broke up, partly because Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala's addictions were incompatible with the intense touring schedule of a rock band at the peak of its success up to that point. And, as we'll see, a tragic event tied to opiates would also play a decisive role in the genesis of "De-Loused In The Comatorium."
Traditional music and rock, the Seventies and the alternative music of the following decades. Bilingualism, surrealist or psychedelic visions (from Bosch to Jodorowsky, by way of Luis Buñuel and Carlos Castaneda). Jazz, dub, drugs. The mixture from which the Mars Volta formula condensed was very distant in time and space from that of early progressive rock, but ultimately also very similar. And their sound mirrored this contrast: overflowing with influences, yet at the same time as thoroughly original, unique and centrifugal as that of the genre's pioneers.

Calculation and psychedelia

On February 15, 1996, friend and artist Julio Venegas took his own life, according to some accounts by throwing himself into El Paso's morning traffic from a highway overpass. In the recent past, he had repeatedly attempted suicide. In one such attempt, injecting a massive dose of morphine had resulted in a prolonged coma. Later, Venegas would repeat the act by mixing several chemical substances, again unsuccessfully, until the fatal outcome.
Venegas's death, a near-mentor figure to Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala, shook both of them deeply. The song "Ebroglio," on At The Drive-In's debut album "Acrobatic Tenement" (1996), is probably dedicated to their friend's memory. The same is likely true of "Concertina," from the first release under the Mars Volta name, the 2002 EP "Tremulant." It would be with "De-Loused In The Comatorium," however, that the two would turn the commemoration of Venegas into a crucial creative engine.
Accompanied by a "story book" written by Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Jeremy Ward, "De-Loused In The Comatorium" centers on the fictional character of Cerpin Taxt, a man who falls into a coma after injecting a mix of morphine and rat poison. The visions experienced during the coma are the narrative core of the album. To set them to music, Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala enlisted drummer Jon Theodore (previously with HiM, Royal Trux, Trans Am) and keyboardist Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, along with Jeremy Ward as sonic manipulator. All three had already supported the duo on the first EP, and both Owens and Ward had also been part of the lineup of De Facto, the dub/fusion project that served as an interlude between At The Drive-In and Mars Volta. Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers came in on bass, while behind the mixing desk, alongside Rodríguez-López, was one of the most prolific and respected rock and hip-hop producers around: Rick Rubin, whose muscular, layered sound had already enriched landmark albums by Slayer and Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, System Of A Down, and indeed Red Hot Chili Peppers themselves.

Sustained, repetitive and initially hushed notes kick off "Son et lumiere," a brief psychedelic introduction that paves the way for "Inertiatic Esp," a direct continuation of the piece. Separating the two tracks are sudden electric guitar breaks that foreshadow one of the key ingredients of the band's recipe: the abrupt shift in intensity (and timbre, and time signature, and style, and mood). The juxtaposition of multiple moods has always been, among all traits, perhaps the most visible hallmark of the progressive attitude, but by combining this element with post-hardcore's ferocity and their kaleidoscope of available influences, Mars Volta take this to the nth degree, and it immediately stands out as an overwhelming novelty. The rhythmic salvos of "Inertiatic Esp" are an early, crystal-clear example: alternating between two patterns in 6/4 — one frantic, one calmer — and interspersing them with electric guitar incursions in 5/4, Theodore and Rodríguez-López capture the surgical, cerebral quality of math-rock — often prone to navel-gazing — and turn it into a hugely powerful expressive vehicle, the shape-shifting backbone of Cerpin Taxt's ever-mutating universe of visions.
Both in this opening section, which gives a crucial role to Owens's electric piano, and in the following one dominated by 7/4 and the death-defying Theodore/Rodríguez-López pairing, and finally in the coda, Bixler-Zavala's melodic lines are the listener's main handhold, an instantly memorable anchor that guides them solidly through the composition's chaos.

Once again it's a psychedelic transition, made of backwards-tracked guitar and cymbals, that leads into the explosive opening of "Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)." The frequent use of ambient, destructured, sonically disorienting interludes is another cornerstone of the Mars Volta style, one that would become extreme in live performances, where improvised bridges between songs could end up lasting longer than the tightly composed sections themselves. Once again, the track — among the most incisive and, in some ways, "pop" the band ever recorded — is built on exaggerated dynamic contrasts: essentially in 6/4, it alternates frantic passages in which Theodore throws himself into salsa-hardcore polyrhythms with almost lulling verses, which Bixler-Zavala uses to articulate his boldest imagery. Fully at ease in both waters, Rodríguez-López unleashes a razor-sharp, oblique riff for the first part (inspired by "Deceptacon" by Le Tigre), and an equally striking arpeggio for the second. On the chorus, the lyrical and the muscular converge, spilling into an epic mood that finds its perfect closing flourish in the intervention of the Mellotron.

Sonic riddles and mental labyrinths

It's difficult, so far, to trace the progress of Cerpin Taxt's dreamlike ordeal. Bixler-Zavala's lyrics are deliberately cryptic, dense with invented language and flights of fancy that make them masterpieces of suggestiveness, even as they remain essentially incomprehensible on a narrative level. A lover of vivid, high-register terms, Bixler-Zavala pairs words into newly coined expressions and phrases that dissolve their own precision of meaning. Any attempt to decode lines like "What of this mongrel architect?/ A broken arm of sewers set/ Past, present, and future tense/ Clipside of the pink-eyed fountain" (from "Inertiatic Esp") or "Made its way through the tracks of a snail-slouching whisper/ Half-mast commute through umbilical blisters/ Specter will lurk, radar has gathered/ Midnight neuces from boxcar cadavers" (from "Roulette Dares") is left entirely to the listener, and over the years online communities have sprung up largely devoted to attempts at deciphering Bixler-Zavala's writing.
The opacity of the lyrics is nonetheless no obstacle to their effectiveness — if anything, combined with the imagination and musicality of the wordplay, it makes each verse a one-of-a-kind puzzle that lodges itself in fans' memories and periodically resurfaces, carrying with it the allure and the nagging pull of the whole song it belongs to.
Then again, the two musicians' pursuit is intentionally devoted to mind-bending, and much of their artistic, literary and cinematic taste intersects with the forerunners of what, in the early 2000s, would jokingly be dubbed "mindfuck" cinema. Jodorowsky and Buñuel have already been mentioned, but the list could also include Thomas Pynchon, William Burroughs, David Lynch. In numerous statements and interviews, the two have taken a very open, educational approach when discussing their inspirations, seeing these indirect forms of dialogue with fans as a chance to introduce them to new artistic passions. Bixler-Zavala points to the Red Hot Chili Peppers as a possible source of this spirit: "In every interview [...] they'd namedrop. And growing up I realized that was really cool, because so many young kids needed to hear stuff like that [...] and needed someone to tell them there isn't just punk rock, that every form of music matters."

Be that as it may, the setting of "Drunkship Of Lanterns" is, for once, relatively clear. Cerpin Taxt finds himself in a graveyard of submarines. It's one of the many abandoned places referenced by the album's lyrics and the story book (among others, a train yard in "Roulette Dares" and an actual desert in "Cicatriz Esp"). Once again it's the juxtaposition of images (rusted propellers, silenced engines, trans-oceanic depths, compasses "withering in the wind") that creates the desolate, unsettling landscape through which the protagonist wanders, unable to find a way out. Trapped, Cerpin Taxt passes the time listening to the sound of his own blinking eyes ("Lash of one thousand eyebrows clicking/ Counting the toll").
In contrast to the stagnation evoked by the words, the track is among the most restless on the album. Over an especially intricate salsa percussion bed, Flea's bass shines through for the first time in its most recognizable form, the punk-funk hiccup that made him a model for a generation of musicians, especially in alternative metal ("I think every kid who picked up a bass between 1986 and today was obviously influenced by Flea," Bixler-Zavala once suggested). Even more than other tracks on the album, "Drunkship Of Lanterns" foregrounds instrumental interplay and derailments, with a constantly enriched web of parts that, after an ultra-psychedelic peak, gives way to a brief electronic coda that, allowing for the difference in scale, sounds like a dub remake of the interludes between the main tracks of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway."
The string of surreal encounters and circumstances staged by the lyrics also recalls Peter Gabriel's narrative on his dizzying concept album with Genesis. In "Eriatarka," the flow of visions leads into the clutches of a surgeon with dog heads for hands, which first tear apart the flesh of whoever is under his knife and then lick the wounds they've inflicted. From the terrifying operation, Cerpin Taxt re-emerges as "Clavietika Los Tres Ojos." None of this, of course, would be directly comprehensible without the support of the story book. What is clear, however, is the track's transformative nature: it starts out serene and, within a few powerful, rising bass notes, morphs into a frenzied rhythmic assault, again bolstered by the Mellotron and immediately followed by disorienting electronic manipulations and a brief, searing solo from Rodríguez-López. The second, forceful chorus gives way to another scalding guitar intervention, which flows seamlessly into a dub half-time section marking the protagonist's definitive metamorphosis.

The twelve and a half minutes of "Cicatriz Esp" represent the album's peak in terms of ambition. For the occasion, the lineup is joined by another member of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (and, coincidentally, a bona fide Genesis devotee): John Frusciante, who enriches the track with his guitar and his work on synthesizers. The piece is, in every sense, a trip within the trip, a parenthetical suite that encloses, between two mirrored sung sections, a vast instrumental stretch overflowing with effects, guitar interplay and electronic undertow.
The track's opening makes particularly clear a device already used repeatedly on the album: the electronic treatment of the voice, to emphasize its unhinged character. This element, though not this alone, connects the Mars Volta's eclectic style to that of another kaleidoscopic progressive fish out of water: Britain's Mansun, who, moving on from britpop, had released the many-faceted, unclassifiable "Six" in 1998. Among the many influences the Mars Volta have cited, the English band's name never seems to come up, yet listening to a track like "Negative" reveals a surprising bridge between the progressive undercurrents that very different genres were developing in those years on opposite shores of the Atlantic.

An ending, a beginning

The tangled narrative arc draws to a close in "This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed", which ends with the burial of Clavietika/Cerpin Taxt's ashes (to be followed by the awakening from the coma). Musically, this is one of the passages most faithful to the band's salsa roots, with the melodic scheme, as well as the rhythmic ones, more closely aligned than usual with Rodríguez-López's beloved Latin American heroes. The Mars Volta's music has often been compared, not without good reason, to the jazz/psych/prog/salsa/rock formula of Santana, yet even here that name is curiously absent from the band's long lists of stated influences. Similarly missing are explicit references to other progressively-minded latin rock outfits, such as the Californian Azteca and Malo or New York's Changó. Far more frequent, however, are the acknowledgments of more traditional artists, especially those active between the Sixties and Seventies. Besides the already-mentioned Larry Harlow (who would go on to appear on "L'Via L'Viaquez" on the subsequent “Frances The Mute“) and the celebrated Fania All Stars, in which the pianist served, among Rodríguez-López's favourites are the Puerto Rican bandleaders Ray Barretto and Charlie Palmieri (on one occasion the musician named his "El Gigante Del Teclado" as his all-time favourite album – though on at least one other occasion he granted the same status to "Hacheros Pa' Un Palo" by another Puerto Rican ensemble, Sonora Ponceña). Regarding this latter record, and the impact of the salsa style on his music, he once stated: "The Mars Volta have been portrayed as 'prog-rock', but our sound was above all a fusion of our traditional music and punk. [Listening to their album] you'll hear that our traditional music, our pop music, is studded with tempo changes, time-signature changes, and complex horn arrangements. The spirit of The Mars Volta isn't really about the 'prog' label we've been given – when you listen to this and other traditional records, I think you can grasp where I'm coming from."

Also released as a single (the second, after "Inertiatic Esp"), "Televators" is the album's most classically-structured song, a ballad anchored by acoustic guitar that only gains percussive arrangement toward its close. It depicts the moment of Cerpin Taxt's final suicide, as, having recovered from his coma, he chooses to throw himself into oncoming traffic from an overpass. In its ever-oblique but more direct-than-usual fashion, the lyric alludes to the final images of his life:

You should have seen
The curse that flew right by you
Page of concrete
Stained walks crutch in hobbled sway
Auto-da-fé
A capillary hint of red
Only this manupod
Crescent in shape has escaped

The song's fairly linear development allows us to delve at least a little into Rodríguez-López's preferred harmonic strategies. Like other tracks on the record, the underlying scheme is solidly anchored to a single key (B minor, in this case), with the chords following conventional movements while often appearing in enriched or altered forms that defy the most predictable expectations. Here, the verse oscillates between the tonic and G major, though the latter is expanded with an ever-elusive major seventh. In the chorus, the oscillation shifts slightly, alternating between E minor and G major. The latter, however, appears only briefly before quickly shifting to G minor. It's a well-worn trick, a shading often dubbed "Beatlesque" that recurs in famous songs such as "In My Life", "Life On Mars", "Xanadu", "Don't Look Back In Anger", "No Surprises" (but also in "Para Ir" by Almendra, the band of Luis Alberto Spinetta, the Argentine musician much beloved by Rodríguez-López and often cited by him as an inspiration). A little further on, the same E minor chord is played in two different fingerings, bringing the bass movement into relief. Devices like these don't disrupt the song's immediacy, but lend it an enigmatic touch that suits both its role within the album and the band's very mission perfectly.
Understandably, the video accompanying the single leaves aside the death-related references, instead playing up the surreal – not to say spiritual – character of the song's imagery. Directed by the trio The Saline Project and HSI Productions, it relocates the setting to a forest bathed in twilight and populated by animal creatures that appear and vanish in step with mysterious bursts of light. At the end of the animated narrative, one of these beings, hemmed in by the advancing city, leaps into the unknown, throwing itself from a waterfall toward a bright patch of light. Though executed differently, the film recalls, in theme and imagery, another masterpiece of alternative prog from the first decade of the 2000s, "Introducing Palace Players" by Mew.

The album could have ended with "Televators", but out of its coda emerges "Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt". Another parenthetical episode, with an incipit and conclusion among the most heavy on the record (with Bixler-Zavala's high-pitched voice more Robert Plant than ever), bookending a tortuous instrumental digression in which all the band's inclinations come simultaneously back into play. Electronic chaos and dub murk, guitar zigzags, latin rhythms, wildly off-kilter intrusions. The story book doesn't offer much help in making sense of the track's events: the narrative breaks off at the end of "Televators". Clues suggest that halfway through the song the focus shifts from those mourning Cerpin Taxt to the spirit of the protagonist himself, who recounts in the first person his arrival at his final destination.
The track is especially enriched by Jeremy Ward's sonic contributions, though he did not live to see the album's release in June 2003. On May 25 of that year, the musician was found dead of a heroin overdose. Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala would later state that the event was a decisive factor in pushing them to give up their own addiction. Partly as a tribute to their friend, the two based their next album, "Frances The Mute", on an anonymous diary Ward had found in a car during his work as a repossession agent.

Wrapped in a cover by Hipgnosis founder Storm Thorgerson, “De-Loused In The Comatorium” earned immediate and enthusiastic acclaim from critics (among the few exceptions, besides Pitchfork's 4.9, was the lukewarm verdict from Alberto Guidetti on OndaRock). Over the years, though, it proved to be a divisive record: both among longtime opponents of progressive rock in any form and among the genre's more conservative devotees, the hyper-hybridized, hyper-kinetic formula devised by the two Texans is to this day considered deeply hard to swallow. Setting aside the die-hard haters, and the widely varying opinions even among fans regarding the later stretch of the band's career, The Mars Volta's debut has long since come to be regarded as a classic.
The same cannot be said, at least among the "wider audience" that follows independent and alternative music, for the dozens upon dozens of bands that emerged alongside or in the wake of The Mars Volta. The protagonists of this new progressive explosion, often hailing from the United States and largely unmoored from Seventies-era conventions, expanded the languages of emo and post-hardcore, merging them with a plurality of genres and stimuli. The equivalent of what every rock fan associates with the early Seventies, but updated to the artistic and musical landscape of forty years later. Bands like Dredg, Coheed And Cambria, The Dear Hunter, Brazil, Circa Survive, Closure In Moscow, RX Bandits (though the list could go on forever!) fused sounds born of punk and alternative metal with post-rock, IDM electronics, frontier jazz and avant-rock textures, managing to build personal perspectives along the thin line separating experimentation from self-indulgence, melodic immediacy from slavish adherence to pop conventions. In shaping their visions, they engaged in dialogue with comics and drew inspiration from contemporary literary and cinematic movements (from ergodic literature to the already-mentioned mindfuck cinema). There's no way to prove that this alternative prog renaissance wouldn't have happened without The Mars Volta's contribution, but the imprint of “De-Loused In The Comatorium” is distinctly perceptible in virtually every key album of the movement. Perhaps the new world was already there waiting to be discovered, but the path charted by Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala was the trailblazer that indelibly marked the progressive maps of the years to come.

Unless otherwise specified, statements and interview excerpts from the musicians are drawn from the archived version of the Thecomatorium.com forum, rich with material otherwise no longer available online.

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10/03/2024