Any attempt at trying to write a by-the-numbers review of these guys more or less ends once you’ve said ‘The Mars Volta have got the two afro-ed ones from At The Drive-In in it’. Which it has, but that’s as far as old band biography and look-how-their-sound-has-progressed platitudes can go. T.M.V are Cedric Bixler’s old band fed through some kind of industrial meat grinder used to crush bull skulls into bloody powder and because I’m not very good with musical labels I’d have to put The Mars Volta roughly in the category of Evil Jazz. Truth be told, I hadn’t heard any Voltra stuff before the gig but I’d been told that compared to Sparta (the other three ATD-I guy’s 3-minute-hit band) The Mars Volta had gone slightly mental. But mental is good, I mean At The Drive-In didn’t exactly make music for dullards so I went into the gig looking forward to something cool.
What I got was a huge-haired Jazz Metal behemoth that vaporised anybody within twenty feet of the P.A system. Bixler and Rodriguez’s new five-piece band was just as brutal and discordant as ATD-I but now they were toting jazz-organs and monstrous acid-jazz-prog-metal !FREEK! outs which more or less screwed any attempt at trying to single out any particular tune for reviewing purposes because thinking back, it was all one long skull-fracturing wall of noise. But WHAT a noise…like a petrol station exploding or something. Adding to it was the effortless cool of the Thelonious-Monk fellow behind the organ, Bixler hanging off his mic stand like a afro-ed Ring Wraith and Rodriguez bugging out all over the place, swinging his guitar around his back like he was on fire.
And he was. Omar Rodriguez is an awesome guitarist. I kept watching his hands as he played and-(drags out Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Clichés)-his fingers were like greased lightening over the frets. There was a lot of the old ATD-I discord noise smashing out of his amps but within the new experimental jazzy framework of out-and-out mentalism, it sounded different. This is probably because some of the songs were hitting the ten-minute mark and its right about now that I become a fugitive from the Jazz Police…
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…The Mars Volta were really, brutally cool but as I strained my mangled ears through the aural punishment I found it hard to pick out any real tunes. For me, this is my big nark with jazz: it doesn’t go anywhere. Call me a philistine if you want, but I think that when a band decides to ‘experiment’ with jazz they have to tread a very fine line between purpose and endless noodling. Basically there wasn’t many tunes in among the noise. I know jazz is a very complex genre that people spend their lives studying, and I will probably go to hell for saying this, but stuff like free-jazz is more about musical virtuosity than writing songs that you can jump around and get all sweaty to. Metal is one of the best kinds of music for that, so, for me, trying to marry jazz and metal is like trying to mix chocolate and water. There were times when something caught my ear but it was usually lost in another dense barrage of soloing and feedback. But maybe that’s the point and I’m just not getting it.
The Mars Volta was a great gig simply for the sheer scale of it all and afterwards, when I went into the pizza shop to get some chips, I couldn’t really hear what the bloke behind the counter was saying because my ears were ringing. And that’s always fun.
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