Music Box | The Mars Volta

Mike Newmark Columnist

Progressive rock has always been about excess. From long hair to the incorporation of “highbrow” genres (jazz, classical) to wildly far-out album concepts, the self-indulgence of prog has yet to be surpassed by any musical style in recent memory. What’s so striking about prog is how seriously its proponents have regarded it, even though everyone else (hand up here behind the computer) thinks of it as a big joke. Can you blame us? The near-universal reaction to Kansas noodling on the harmonium or Yngwie Malmsteen pelvis-thrusting his way through a Paganini capriccio has always been something akin to “You have got to be kidding me.”

In fact, those were the first words to escape my lips upon hearing the Mars Volta’s fourth full-length racket, The Bedlam in Goliath. No one keeps the prog-rock torch aflame in 2008 like the Mars Volta, who are supplementing Bedlam with a written history of the group, a concert DVD, a video documentary and even a computer game, to say nothing of the music itself. Given the band’s solipsism and the uncoolness of their influences, I’m in awe of their ability to sustain both their momentum and their popularity over several years (their fantastic live shows probably have something to do with it). But on The Bedlam in Goliath, the plot gets lost, the sound gets silly, and the band finds itself caught in the sucking whirlpools of misguided directions and bad ideas.

Truth be told, The Bedlam in Goliath is somewhat less proggy than the three records before it, instead finding most of its inspiration in the Power of Rock ’n Roll. I wish I could call it a cross between AC/DC and Rush, but while listening I constantly had to fight back images of Spinal Tap jumping out of pods and shredding their guitars at Stonehenge. What makes this album prog is the length—a full 80 minutes—and songs that have an awfully hard time justifying their erratic running times. There’s no reason for “Cavalettas” to be nine minutes and “Tourniquet Man” to be two when every song sounds like the next. The band may as well have conceived The Bedlam in Goliath as one very long piece, as the barriers between tracks are just arbitrary markers cutting up a sonic blob.

On Bedlam, the Mars Volta takes a big risk: altering the nature of Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s vocals the whole way through. Maybe I’m a softie, but I loved Bixler-Zavala’s voice on songs like “Inertiatic ESP” from De-Loused in the Comatorium; his high-pitched, androgynous vibrato made the song’s sincerity palpable. Here, it’s transformed into something buzzier and less pure, either naturally or with the aid of a vocoder, causing Bixler-Zavala to sound not unlike an alien hornet. Bixler-Zavala’s voice was the Mars Volta’s only hope of making The Bedlam in Goliath marginally pretty, and they blew it. A less noticeable difference is the addition of electronics that screech and wheeze of their own accord. As far as I’m concerned, they have no purpose except to parallel Bixler-Zavala’s repellant vocals or to make everything that much louder. Bedlam is certainly a loud record, and unfortunately, that’s about all there is to recommend it.

There are no hooks or lasting melodies on The Bedlam in Goliath, only discordant passages masquerading as such. The intensity is always cranked up to 11 and the instrumentalists don’t stay in one place for long, so it’s difficult to tell what’s plain dull and what’s garbage by the end of the record. I mean, the way the guitars scream in monotone when they’re not imitating David St. Hubbins, and the way the various noises get into about 800 catfights, and the way the flutes (flutes!) in “Cavalettas” die with the rest of the song… Someone tell me, is there actually an audience for this? Fervent fans may argue that the musicianship has improved since 2006’s Amputecture, but this is a moot point. As Yngwie Malmsteen would tell you in one of his darker hours, it doesn’t matter how virtuosic you are if nobody cares about what you’re playing.

Oh yeah, there’s also supposed to be a concept in here somewhere. Looking at the title, cover art and press release describing a newfound interest in the Middle East, you could probably come up with one—perhaps something about conflict and containment. Take a closer look, though, and nothing holds up. “Goliath” isn’t a place as the title would indicate; he’s a person. On the cover, the woman in green and the men in white seem to hail from different continents. Some of the song titles are actual words while some are complete gibberish, and the lyrics are just random impurities strung together (“She came to me / When she was pouring out of drool / Under sedation / Under vulgar multitudes”). And if indeed there are Middle Eastern flourishes in the music, I have yet to locate them. There’s a fine line between brilliance and B.S. in progressive rock, and on The Bedlam in Goliath, the Mars Volta have found themselves clearly on the wrong side of it for the first time.