THE MARS VOLTA
"The Bedlam in Goliath"
Released: Jan. 29, 2008
Genre: Rock, Progressive, Alternative

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At once immediate and drawn out, ordered and chaotic, 'Bedlam' can be a tough album to swallow. If you can bear the sonic barrage, there is an (over?)abundance of intelligence and finesse on display, precariously treading a line between exciting virtuosity and boring instrumental noodling.

Multimedia update: Click here for an audio version of this review, including track samples.

IF PINK FLOYD provides the music to take you to the dark side of the moon, then The Mars Volta must take you to an entirely different dimension as needles prick your skin, your eyes melt, and your brain freezes into an intergalactic sludge with primal knowledge of the universe.

Few times in my life have I literally jumped upon hearing unexpected types of music. My first experiences of this phenomenon involved Nine Inch Nails, Napalm Death, and Rammstein. I can now safely say that The Volta’s “The Bedlam in Goliath” has been added to the list.

Volta guitarist/composer Omar Rodríguez-López claims that “Bedlam” is “the record that didn’t want to be born.” If this is truly the case, then it is a miracle that the album actually did get recorded.

Unfortunately, it also means that the band had to force it, against its will, into being. No matter what strengths the album has (and they are many), much of it sounds as if each song had to be dragged screaming into the sunlight from Lopez’s mind.

More than 70 minutes in running time, “Bedlam” definitely isn’t for those with short attention spans. Only two songs are under three minutes, and four are over seven in length. Each second of music is a highly intricate, convoluted exploration of almost every note imaginable.

Guitarist extraordinaire Rodríguez-López’s twisting, often atonal, Robert Fripp-worshipping solos shriek and feed back before delving back into technical polyrhythms supporting singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s unbelievably high, typically surrealistic vocals while pounding drums, sweeping keyboards, and the occasional saxophone provide background dissonance. Just another day at the office for the Volta.

So grand is the band’s vision that it can be extremely easy to be swept up in their bizarre world. Each song flows into the next so effectively that I needed to check my CD player to see if the album had actually progressed to a new song or if the song had simply taken a new unexpected turn. When the group actually decides to have something resembling a chorus, it is always catchy or at the very least interesting.

When Bixler-Zavala breaks into the unexpected verse “Folding wormholes/ My time is riding/ In the alphabet” in the middle of “Metatron,” it isn’t hard to imagine a visual interpretation to his nonsensical ravings due to the visceral nature of the music. When he forcefully enunciates “She fumigated my mental hygiene” near the end of “Goliath,” it isn’t all that difficult to sympathize with him, even if you aren’t entirely sure what the hell it means.

As the album rumbles onward, Bixler-Zavala spins increasingly vague tales pertaining to the band’s purported bad omens at the hands of a Ouija board. Throw in plenty of references to Santería for good measure, and you are left with a steaming pot of confused, muddled superstitious intrigue which is near impossible to decipher. “If you came here for semantics,” Bixler-Zavala proclaims in “Cavalettas,” “It’s only a matter of folding time and space/ Before I become your epidemic.”

When even conventional instruments fail to convey the band’s increasingly difficult musical message, effects galore step in to fill the void. Rodríguez-López distorts his guitar tone so much that it is often difficult to actually determine that he is indeed playing a guitar. Similarly, Bixler-Zavala’s synthesized vocals on the opener “Aberinkula” in particular take standard rock singing into the stratosphere.

On the flipside, new drummer Thomas Pridgen manages to create the rhythmically diverse beats the Volta are known for, but he does it in a far inferior manner to drummer Jon Theodore. As such, even the album’s best grooves on “Goliath” and “Wax Simulacra” can’t touch the effortless rhythm of “L’Via L’Viaquez” from 2005’s “Frances the Mute,” among others.

While comparisons to previous work often can be unfair to bands’ good work, in this case the lack of diversity where there was once a cornucopia of different styles is hardly called for.

By the time silence overcame the sudden ending of “Conjugal Burns,” I was left with a strange mixture of awe and musical indigestion. While rightfully impressed by the band’s arrangements, I found that they precariously tread a line between exciting virtuosity and boring instrumental noodling, as do many progressive bands. This is the genre’s greatest weakness. In no other style is there such a razor’s edge separation between excellence and boredom.

While the Volta manage to walk the fairer side most of the time, all too often they fall over to the dark side. In particular, I found passages in “Cavalettas” and “Soothsayer” to be rather tedious and ultimately unnecessary.

Much as writers occasionally attempt to obscure poor reasoning or a lack of ideas with large vocabularies and unoriginal rhetoric, so do the Volta fall into the vice of hiding a lack of melodic ideas in a jungle of notes and distortion.

Ultimately, “Bedlam” is an anomaly in modern music. At once immediate and drawn out, ordered and chaotic, it can be a tough album to swallow. If you can bear the sonic barrage unleashed by a listen, there is an (over?)abundance of intelligence and finesse on display.

For the 76 minutes it plays, the world is not the same. It is soaked in psychedelic colors and dripping with chaos. However, when it ends as abruptly as it began, there is a bitter quality, much as there is on all Volta albums. Where do we go from here?

As Bixler-Zavala states in “Goliath”: “I’ve never heard a man/ Speak like this man before.”

Neither have I, Cedric. Neither have I.