The Mars Volta

Jan. 25^th, 2008 – In the last few minutes of the Mars Volta’s sold-out performance at the Beaumont Club in Kansas City, I received a text message.

    “When the world ends, this is the music that will be playing,” declared my pal Jake.

    He may be right about the band’s latest album. On shelves just this week, The Bedlam in Goliath is downright demonic. Feedback, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s grinding guitar, creepy ethnic melodies and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s distorted vocals make for an unsettling listen. And the experience gets weirder as you pick up on all the apocalyptic imagery and devils in the lyrics. Example: “The horsemen you have brought deserve me/Somehow they’ve made it through the floor.”

    Yet, live in Kansas City, the Mars Volta wasn’t scary at all. On the contrary, the performance was boring. Superfans like my buddy Jake and the handful of people who staggered out of the mosh pit, sweaty and dazed, obviously felt differently. And I’ll admit, the band has chops.

    Even working maracas into the postmodern mix, the Mars Volta somehow blends prog, classic rock, hardcore, metal and jazz into guttural compositions that spit in the face of verse-chorus-verse structure. On top of it all, Bixler-Zavala, notorious for his on-stage flailing, achieves an impressive vocal range that stretches from a low tenor to Mariah Carey territory.

    At one point, he dared to ask the smokers in the crowd not to indulge for the duration of his performance. The request surely had to do with his voice. But his caterwaul went along with the abrasive music whether he was on key or off.

    It’s the jamming that killed the experience.

    The band, which writes long to begin with, stretched every epic tune beyond its limit. Even the first song of the night—sadly for me, the highlight of the whole evening—“Roulette Dares (This is the Haunt)” seemed to drag on through multiple crescendos. From there, the mindfuck continued for more than two hours, a set that drew heavily from new material still unheard by much of the crowd. The result for a casual fan like me: aural exhaustion.

    That reaction was doubly disappointing considering my hour-long wait in freezing Missouri weather to even get in the door that night. Many of the 1,200-plus people in the audience had waited longer, without coats, believing doors would open an hour earlier than they did.

    But if you count quantity over quality, the folks who paid still got their money’s worth. There was no opening act. Had there been, the Mars Volta may not have gotten to rock the stage so long.



    Of course, I’ll take a tight set over a bloated one any day. But that’s just me.

 Check out more photos from the show at the Synthesis blog.

Bookmark:

Comments down for maintenance.