Boundry-breaking Mars Volta stumble with third studio album

Originally published in the Lamron (10/17/06)

From their tenure as captains of the post-hardcore, indie vessel At the Drive-In to their recent psychedelic space-rock project The Mars Volta, the musical dynamic of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler has always been about a sharp unpredictability, a revolving door into a musical world never before heard. And up until this year, they have been wildly successful, if a bit overlooked, at their goal. With the release this year of The Mars Volta’s latest studio album, Amputechture, the duo finds themselves in a realm they have valiantly avoided until now – familiarity. And while for any other young band this might just be the case of a group settling into their sound, The Mars Volta were never about that, and the streaks of prosaic predictability found on this disc are unsettling.

The opening track, “Vicarious Atonement” (a surprisingly straightforward title considering who we are talking about here), simply never gets off the ground. It is more of an atmospheric intro to the album than a full-fledged song, and at seven-plus minutes, this meddling is simply inexcusable. Compare this to the opening track of their last album, Frances the Mute; it opens with a mysterious acoustic melody before exploding into a gargantuan and complex guitar riff that blows the listener away. There’s no sense of urgency like that here – it’s as if the band recorded the album while in a trance, occasionally being subjected to brief electric shocks that are represented by the spattering of energy occasionally strewn about.

For a 76-minute album, there is just not enough going on. That’s not to say there isn’t the typically-superb musicianship one comes to expect from the band – the mind-bending time signatures are still there, as are the winding, careening guitar gymnastics courtesy mostly of Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante – but the album seems stale at times, something all too glaring from a band bent on stuffing as much substance into their music as humanly possible. There is an overabundance of free-jazz saxophones and long sections of music that seem to have no direction. “Tetragrammaton,” for example, starts off with a wonderful melody accompanied by Bixler’s wolf-like howl, only to self-distruct into a steaming stew of distortion and white noise six minutes in. It finally picks up into a downright fabulous guitar solo later, but this is a song that is close to seventeen minutes long, and the occasional lapses of muscle grate on the listener after a while.

The only song on the album that shows that Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler haven’t totally forgotten how to throw inhibition to the wind and just rock out is the seventh track, “Day of the Baphomets,” a musical enigma of seismic proportions, more of a schizophrenic medley of artistic genius then a single rock song. If nothing else, this song confirms that the band “still has it,” even if they have curiously avoided showing it for the remaining portions of the album. This reality is very frustrating for the listener, because everyone knows what these musicians are capable of if only they can manage to put aside their collective vanity long enough. Here’s hoping they learn to do it next time.