The Mars Volta

One Liner:  Arty, experimental hard rock weirdos

Wikipedia Genre: Progressive rock, experimental rock

Home: NYC

Poster Position: Level 2 (4) 
Weekend One Only.
Friday.

Thoughts:  I swear they were are the Festival before and I caught a few songs.  But I don't see a review of them in the archives.  Weird.  My recollection of seeing a few songs was that I'd had enough.  And when I listen to them on Spotify, I recognize that feeling.  In fact, here is my review of their most recent album:

"Mars Volta - The Mars Volta.  Please make it stop.  I really can't do this anymore.  I remember seeing them live one time, and feeling like they were an amazing future Zeppelin monster in the making that I should remember.  And every album since then is another disappointing pile of half-baked guitar-centered crap.  Some of it is now soft-rock.  What am I doing here?  The album opener is the top track before people head for the exits.  "Blacklight Shine."  3.1 million.  Even that song title sounds like a high school kid's failed band named it.

I mean, it is not the worst song ever or anything, but nothing on this album caught my interest.  No thanks."

And their second most popular song - "The Widow" - sounds great for the majority of it, but then ends with like 2 minutes of eardrum abusive noises that are just entirely unnecessary.  

And the name?  One of the members said this: "The Volta is taken from a Federico Fellini book about his films, what he characterizes as a changing of scene, or a turnaround; a new scene to him is called Volta. Y'know, changing of time and the changeover. And Mars, we're just fascinated by science fiction so and it's something that ultimately looked as in anything I write, its meaning is always up to the listener. As the way we write songs and words, if it looks great on paper then to us it's like painting, so if it looks good meaning the second then people usually have a better interpretation than we ever would."  WTF are you even saying, man?

Don't get me wrong, I love Led Zeppelin!  I even love the Wolfmother/Greta Van Fleet copycats of the Zep sound!  I'm all for more Zeppelin sound in the world!  There are tons of little bits and pieces of these songs that prick up my ears with pleasure, but the overall product, when mashed together and shoved into some weird, arty box of aural pain, that ain't it.  Sorry, I got ahead of myself and crapped all over this before I even got into their story.

This is an El Paso band, formed in 2001, by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala.  They were both previously in another band called At The Drive-In (a band I don't think I have ever heard before).  Their debut featured Flea on the bass and was produced by Rick Rubin, grabbing them critical acclaim at the time, although one of the members complained in an interview that Rubin made their sound too clean and good for the common man's ears.  Deloused in the Comatorium was released in 2003, and you can definitely hear the weird artiness that they fully embrace later, but much of this album is more straight-forward rock and roll.  The problem is when they end an otherwise good song with some outro of squawks and screeches that are just not needed at all.  The top track from that disc is their top overall song, "Inertiatic Esp," with 19 million streams.

Those lyrics are deeply weird as hell.  "Its musk was fecal in origin" is quite a turn of phrase.  "clipside of the pinkeye fountain!"  eh, sure?  It is fine.  I can get into the groove on that one and let myself enjoy the jam.  After that album, 2005's Frances the Mute became their best charting album and included that "The Widow" track I mentioned before.  12.9 million streams.

I remember that album cover, but sincerely doubt I ever listened to this whole album before.  But that song at least sounds familiar until the last two minutes when the suffering commences.  Good tune otherwise.  Multiple more albums came out - one a concept album about "the band's turbulent experiences with a ouija-type talking board" - and they scored a Grammy win for Best Hard Rock Performance for this track, "Wax Simulacra."  4.8 million streams.

Not sure what the Grammy folks were up to in 2009, but that is whack.  Man, and the others up for that honor that year are also whack.  Was this really the best that hard rock had to offer in 2008?  Disturbed – "Inside the Fire"; Judas Priest – "Visions"; Mötley Crüe – "Saints of Los Angeles"; Rob Zombie – "The Lords of Salem"  Brutal slate of music.  

They took a hiatus in 2012, then "formally broke up," and one of the hyphen guys made another band.  But in 2014 they repaired their friendship (i.e. realized they make a lot of money with a well-known band and not with some weirdo thing called Bosnian Rainbows) and got back into it.  And now they will be at ACL this year to blast through a new set of weirdo rock and roll!  Lucky us!