De-loused In The Comatorium

When the At The Drive-In bit the dust, their corpus became the worthy but workmanlike Sparta, the animus was reincarnated in The Mars Volta, namely guitarist and principal songwriter Omar A Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixlea Zavala, with a little help here from producer Rick Rubin and Chili Peppers Flea and Frusciante.

But if ATDI’s awesome noise was all coiled fist and bulging vein and tendon strain, a sort of sonic warp spasm that never resolved itself, the Mars Volta are truly meta-physical. De-loused… is a hallucinatory song cycle inspired by the life and times of a deceased artist friend named Julio Venegas, a sort of hypothetical last temptation. Close your eyes and you get flashes of Hispanic action painters flinging colours at bare canvas in whitewashed shanties, or shackled poetical prisoners sketching prohibited images in black dust in a hot tin shed.

The MV are the most mongreloid rock monster since Jane’s Addiction; not so much genetically modified as gruesomely beautiful Doctor Moreau mutations of Latin, dub, electronic music and Black Flag/Fugazi/Bad Brains jazz-hardcore splinters. Indeed, there are entire passages where they slip into Jungian amoebic-amniotic deep space rock (the 12-minute ‘Cicatriz Esp’) only to fade back up into a sort of punked-out acid samba.

‘Inertiac ESP’ and ‘Drunkship Of Lanterns’ take the splatterart free verse of ATDI songs like ‘Invalid Litter Dept’ to the nth degree, boiling with a pressure that suggests unproscribed art produced under martial law. Omar’s lyrical lexicon, his word horde, is neither cut-up nor stream of consciousness, but rather a spew of compound wordplay and found language, a sort of Latin-Spanglish pidgin, all communicated with a terrible urgency by Cedric’s stuck-pig squeal. In sync with this, the music supernovas all over the joint, corkscrewing outwards from molten rhythmic epicentres.

De-loused is outrageous and unbridled, but bound together by an advanced intellectual and gut-level rigour. Like Rated R, Relationship Of Command and Ritual De Lo Habitual, it defines and then redefines what a band can do with base metals.