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At The Drive-in were formed in 1994 in El Paso (Texas), but emigrated to Los
Angeles.
Their early singles,
Hell Paso (Western Breed, 1994) and Alfaro Vive (Western Breed, 1995),
as well as the EP El Gran Orgo (Offtime, 1997), displayed
a Rage Against The Machine-inspired
rap-punk crossover but with a far more prominent emocore approach and
without the obnoxious elements of heavy-metal.
The album In Casino Out (Fearless, 1998) and the
EP Vaja (Fearless, 1999) completed the maturation of the line-up with
Cedric Bixler on vocals, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (born in Puerto Rico but raised in El Paso, Texas) and Jim Ward on guitar,
Paul Himojos on bass and Tony Haijar on drums.
The album will remain their quintessential statement.
Foaming at the mouth, Bixlet rides
the instrumental fever that propels Alpha Centauri, a mixture of
punk epilepsy and country gallop that indulges in tempo shifts and
syncopated "stop-starts".
The band does not hesitate to careen through odd meters and to adorn the melody
with dissonant guitars, as in For Now We Toast.
The unusual balance of grotesque and tragic employed by these songs is
the very "raison d'etre" of A Devil Among the Tailors.
Instrumental creativity and vocal pyrotechnics are wed to a relatively
catchy chorus in Hulahoop Wounds.
The guitar pattern in Chanbara sounds like a call to arms, while
the vocalist shouts his angst to the moon.
The tender and melodic piano-based Hourglass sounds a little out of
context, but proves that the preceding chaos was not due to ineptitude albeit to
design.
While the musical roots of the band are in the tradition of hardcore punk-rock,
At The Drive-in are consumed by the fire of
Fugazi's progressive-hardcore
and develop their songs to the level of the three-minute teen psychodrama,
rather than leaving it at the level of embryonic one-minute rant.
A more professional production on
Relationship of Command (Grand Royal, 2000) helped bring out the
ferocity without sacrificing the art. Here one can easily check the
influences of the quintet.
Arcarsenal takes off amid tribal drums and guitar squeaks with a
guitar-bass combination that is reminiscent of
Guns N' Roses and with vocals drenched in
MC5-grade emphatic frenzy.
The rapping on Pattern Against User sounds more like one of
Jello Biafra's rants.
One Armed Scissor borrows the main riff and the art of screaming from
Led Zeppelin's first album.
Pure punk rage permeates the most personal tracks,
such as Sleepwalk Capsules and Cosmonaut,
barely touched by melodies that, duely developed would be the envy of
Green Day.
Unpredictable dynamic and frequent tempo shifts
(for proof check the dance beat and the lambada break in Enfilade)
enhance the listening experience, while the band also displays good theatrical
skills with
the lengthy psychodramas Invalid Litter Dept and Quarantined
and even a ballad, Non-zero Possibility.
This Station is Non-Operational (2005) is an At The Drive In career retrospective.
Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler formed DeFacto,
a dub project,
and then
Mars Volta, a more progressive outfit featuring keyboardist
Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, , that debuted with the EP
Tremulant (Gold Standard Labs, 2001).
Featuring
the Red Hot Chili Peppers' bassist "Flea",
Mars Volta's De-loused In The Comatorium (Universal, 2003), represented a vast technical improvement over At The Drive In, the original band of chameleon-like vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala and energetic guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.
It is an ambitious and creative work, penned by ambitious and creative musicians, that reinvents prog-rock for the post-emo generation.
The most "regular" song is perhaps Inertiatic ESP, torn by punk spasms.
Announced by the brief overture of Son Et Lumiere (a riff that
emerges from shapeless radio noise and guitar strumming), Inertiatic ESP boasts
versatile and powerful vocals, that range from operatic to rap, and a
hysterical guitar, that engages in a vast repertory of styles.
Quasi-thrash drumming and lugubrious distorted organ pulses fuel this four-minute manifesto.
The seven-minute Roulette Dares relies on an even stronger melody, bordering on the melodramatic standard of Broadway show tunes or of Queen despite the hardcore impetus and the epileptic fits that are worthy of Led Zeppelin's Communication Breakdown.
Emphatic vocals and videogame-like guitar doodling propel
the eight-minute excursion of Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt.
Possibly the album's zenith occurs with the frenzied and virtuoso playing of another seven-minute piece, Drunkship of Lanterns, the prototype for Mars Volta's Latin-metal fusion.
A close competitor in terms of technical prowess is the 12-minute Cicatriz ESP, that boasts three simultaneous guitar solos (John Frusciante on the third guitar),
reminiscent of Neil Young and the Grateful Dead in their most acid moments,
although the piece itself drags on a bit too long and a bit too magniloquent.
The collage-like structures and haphazard dynamics of the best songs define Mars Volta's disorienting praxis. The codas are often the most interesting part of the song (sonically speaking), micro-concertos of sound effects (the brief instrumental Tira Me a las Aranas is basically just a coda, and a superb example of psychedelic tapestry). Their typical song always seems to spiral out of control.
On the downside, a few of these songs are the classic "much ado about nothing".
For example, Eriatarka is a soft ballad with Led Zeppelin-ian tension, replete with sudden bursts of hard-rock riffs and grand guitar melodies.
And Televators is nothing but a power-ballad in disguise.
In the meantime,
Jim Ward formed Sparta
with guitarist Paul Hinojos and drummer Tony Hajjar. They
released the single
Cut Your Ribbon, the EP Austere (2002), which includes
the catchy Mye,
and the albums Wiretap Scars (Dreamworks, 2002), opened by the
virulent Cut Your Ribbon,
and
Porcelain (Geffen, 2004), with the grungey Guns Of Memorial Park
and Death In The Family,
and Threes (2006), the first album with Keeley Davis on guitar,
neither offering
a terribly original variation on At The Drive In's emo-core.
They are basically the alter-ego of Mars Volta: moving towards
melodic, simplified structures instead of intricate, convoluted structures.
At The Drive In's guitarist Jarrett Wrenn and keyboardist Kenny Hopper
formed Crime in Choir, that also features synth-man Jesse Reiner and guitarist
Carson McWhirter, and released a work of ethereal prog-rock,
The Hoop (Frenetic, 2004).
Perhaps the only hard-rock band to be truly unique (and sonically transgressive) in 2005, Mars Volta, having incorporated bassist Juan Alderete, delivered
Frances The Mute (Universal, 2005), an album that matched and surpassed
the art-pomp of its predecessor.
With their first album Mars Volta had tried to balance the urge to exhibit their
astronomical technical skills with the desire to be actually understood by
the audience. On the second album they largely ignored the audience.
The songs are (much) longer and a lot less melodic. They rely on cryptic, neurotic,
elongated structures. They do more than just "deconstruct" known archetypes
and genres. The endings, in particular, often sound like philosophical treatises.
The intricate, non-linear art of the first album is bent to more spectacular
ends. Each piece is a cascade of complex but incoherent fragments that generates
a brutally disjointed but viscerally effective stream of consciousness,
Each of the five tracks is basically an album in itself, made of several
sub-tracks that often collide with their neighbors instead of segueing
smoothly from and into them.
Furthermore,
Theodore's drumming, Rodriguez's guitar, and Bixler's vocals seem to embody
all the technical progress of the last two decades, from
Red Hot Chili Peppers
to Phish,
from Korn
to System Of A Down,
as if progressive-rock (reincarnated in Mars Volta) was attempting to catch up
with all relevant styles developed after its heyday.
The dizzying experience of dissecting these colossal tracks
is enough to swallow much of the recent
history of rock music like a black hole in waiting.
It doesn't mean that everything is essential: one can easily argue that each
track could have been trimmed down to make it more pleasant.
It would have also helped focus on the fragments that truly matter, many of
which are left in the air without a sensible development or ending.
Despite the amount of details, nothing seems to happen by accident.
Even the distant guitar that opens Cygnus Vismund Cygnus sounds like a metaphor, not just a cute sound effect. The 13-minute piece itself is a continuation of Mars Volta's Latin-metal fusion/fission program. After four minutes
of pure frenzy, the guitar intones a jagged jazzy solo (sort of
Peter Green for the age of hyper-neurosis).
Then the loud emphatic staccato tumult restarts. As it is often the case, the
(four-minute) coda is another case of metaphorical albeit undecipherable
art, a collage of sound effects that hardly relates to the song that preceded it.
By the same token, the musique-concrete coda of
the brief (by these standards) The Widow contrasts with the
melodramatic tone and Hendrix-ian guitar of the tune itself.
L'Via l'Viaquez instead well documents how Mars Volta che turn the
cheesiest of themes into an avantgarde piece. It starts out as the most tedious
of Latin-pop songs. After three minutes it slows down into a sleepy
cha-cha intermezzo. Then a soaring heavy-metal guitar brings back the tune.
After a chaotic instrumental break, the vocals repeat the melody. But the
context keeps changing, shifting from sensual whisper to Caribbean vibraphone.
The song is basically twelve minutes of variations over a silly leitmotiv.
A four-minute introduction of alien hisses and wails sets the tone for Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore, a suite in four movements (by the mysterious titles of Vade Mecum, Pour Another Icepick, Pisacis, Con Safo). Then a funereal horn fanfare and Bixler's oneiric lullaby
create a melancholy atmosphere that suddenly explodes in a melodramatic crescendo. Sparse horns dominate the implosion that follows. For a few minutes only disjointed fragments of sound emerge from the fog. Unlike the previous tracks, the
coda of this one is not a disintegration of the tune but a reconstitution of the tune, a slow paradisiac reprise.
They break the pattern again with the 32-minute suite Cassandra Gemini,
the only one to open straight with the main rhythmic/guitar/vocal pattern.
Hardcore frenzy and pop calm alternate to shape a power ballad with bluesy overtones a` la Led Zeppelin's How Many More Times. This narrative juggernaut collapses into pure instrumental and vocal agony, as a symphonic crescendo parallels passionate soul-jazz-blues vocals.
The complex guitar interplay of the second part lifts the kammerspiel
up one more (metaphysical) orbit, or pulls it down one more layer towards the
bottom of (psychic) hell. The coda is the non-plus-ultra of Mars Volta's
semiotic madness, blending Karlheinz Stockhausen's electronic maelstroms and Albert Ayler's free-jazz mayhems.
Scab Dates (Universal, 2005) is a (terrible) live Mars Volta album.
The addition of John Frusciante on
Amputechture (Universal, 2006) did not benefit Mars Volta.
The 17-minute Tetragrammaton is ten (meandering) minutes too long
and the rest is cliched prog-rock that satisfies neither the arena crowds nor
the intellectual elite.
What differentiates this version of Mars Volta from their forefathers
King Crimson and Yes is the jazz and Latin accents.
But that is too little to justify the sprawling instrumental vanity of the group.
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's solo mostly-instrumental project, usually referred to
as the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet, that debuted with
Omar Rodriguez (2005), leaned towards Miles Davis' atmospheric jazz-funk-rock fusion
(the 17-minute Jacob Van Lennepkade, dedicated to the namesake Amsterdam canal).
The live 25-minute EP Please Heat This Eventually (2007) was a collaboration with Damo Suzuki of Can.
Se Dice Bisonte No Bufalo (2007) was the first of the four albums that Rodriguez recorded in 2005, and it includes the studio version of
Please Heat This Eventually without Suzuki's vocals.
His fifth solo
Calibration (Is Pushing Luck And Key Too Far) (n20, 2008) turned to
jazztronica.
Mars Volta's bassist Juan Alderete launched his project Big Sir (featuring vocalist Lisa Paipneau)
with Big Sir (2001) and Und Die Scheibe Andert Sichimmer (2006),
that wed soul, funk and hip-hop influences with the ethos of alternative rock.
The more radio-friendly
The Bedlam In Goliath (Universal, 2008), featuring new drummer Thomas Pridgen,
redefined the meaning of "bombastic" with a furious, relentless
funk-jazz-metal attack that is also capable of countless transformations
within the space of a song.
There are enough ideas for ten albums in brief, spasmodic songs such as
the single Wax Simulacra,
Aberinkula,
Conjugal Burns.
The percussive avalanche and guitar solo of Goliath,
the eight-minute detonation of Metatron
and the nine-minute carpet bombardment of Cavalettas
are full of unexpected turns and twists that try to give meaning to every
second of music.
Wherever he is now (whether hell or heaven), Frank Zappa must be proud of them.
The Mars Volta later launched an online game titled "Goliath: The Soothsayer",
a companion piece for this album.
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez had a prolific career outside Mars Volta, including:
Old Money (Stones Throw, 2008), a pretentious display of
electronic Latin-funk-jazz-rock fusion, notably
the lengthy Old Money,
Cryptomnesia (Rodriguez-Lopez Productions, 2009), credited to El Grupo Nuevo de Omar Rodriguez Lopez,
and the solo Xenophanes (Rodriguez Lopez, 2009), a collection of
mediocre atmospheric pieces.
The stripped-down
Octahedron (Warner, 2009) has too many pointless and aimless songs,
sometimes reminiscent of languid late-career Pink Floyd,
to justify its existence.
The pop-soul ballad Since We've Been Wrong is representative of the
new course, whereas the punkish Cotopaxi and Desperate Graves hint at
what these musicians could do.
Hyro Da Hero, i.e.
Texas' rapper Hyron Fenton,
was backed by a supergroup formed by members of At the Drive-In, The Blood Brothers and Idiot Pilot that delivered rap-rock on his debut
Birth School Work Death (2011).
Mars Volta's Noctourniquet (2012), the first album after the departure
of Isaiah Owens and John Frusciante, remedied the ballad excesses of
Octahedron while at the same time reigning in the prog-rock excesses
of Cassandra Gemini.
Regular songs like The Whip Hand,
Aegis and Dyslexicon (reminiscent of Heart's Magic Man)
make it one of their most accessible works,
without making it one of their most commercial.
Anywhere were Mars Volta's vocalist Cedric Bixler Zavala,
the Triclops' guitarist Christian Beaulieu
and veteran bassist Mike Watt, playing
prog-rock and acid-rock on
Anywhere (2012), that contains the singles
Pyramid Mirrors (2011) and
Infrared Moses (Valley King, 2012)
and also features Toshi Kasai from Big Business.
Isaiah "Ikey" Owens died in 2014.
After a long hiatus,
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala turned to the
Electric Light Orchestra and the
Alan Parsons Project for the poppy
The Mars Volta (2022), whose acoustic version was released as
Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon (Clouds Hill, 2023).
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