STUPID FAT HOBBIT, YOU... fixed it? The Mars Volta and 'Noctourniquet'

This piece was originally posted to the now-closed Castle Co-op on March 19, 2012.

This is not a review.

From the moment I heard ‘Inertiatic ESP’ on Triple J sometime in the early 2004, it was inevitable I was going to spend the next months (and years) obsessed with The Mars Volta, the “partnership between Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala.”

Their 2003 debut album, De-loused in the Comatorium, was something I’d been waiting for for years, a perfect blend of progressive/experimental rock with latin and jazz tinges, a good spot of ambient weirdness, stupid-good musicianship, production value – engineering, I should point out, not the master – and a great deal of passion and heart. I took to it immediately and so completely that The Mars Volta catapulted themselves above my other musical deities to the top of Mount Olympus.

They followed De-loused in 2005 with Frances the Mute, a deepened exploration of their progressive tendencies, owing even more this time around to latin and jazz-fusion, but again avoiding, and this is something I’ll discuss a bit more later, being too self-indulgent. This is of course despite really only having five “tracks,” which many seemed to have trouble wrapping their head around, including Universal Music, who decided to split the album’s 30-plus-minute epic closer ‘Cassandra Gemini’ into eight tracks on the CD release. After an adjustment period, Frances revealed itself the band’s magnum opus, and is to this day my favourite album.

The Mars Volta followed Frances with Amputechture a year later in 2006, The Bedlam in Goliath in 2008, and Octahedron in 2009.

Kinda glossed over the next three, didn’t I? Let’s talk about why.

Plagued perhaps by a rotating roster of members or Rodriguez-Lopez’s self-confessed dictatorship, prolificity and working pace, the band’s releases lacked refinement and became woefully self-indulgent and passionless.

Amputechture was a cut-and-paste of a thousand elements, quickly recorded and assembled at the desk by Rodriguez-Lopez, and while there’s a lot to like about it, it suffered for it. Drummer extraordinaire John Theodore wasn’t keeping up with the pace and dedication expected of him and was dismissed -- the beginning of the band’s lineup troubles -- which certainly must have contributed to the need for this method of recording. It seemed as though this method was carried through to Bedlam and Octahedron but less successfully, Bedlam containing a whole bunch of fat and Octahedron just being generally uninteresting.

Assigning something as self-indulgent is difficult for me. Our perspective as critic or listener is entirely subjective, and it’s a strange thing to attempt to define where the line of self-indulgence is for a band like The Mars Volta, who are clearly experimental and have made a big deal about following their own compass. (But we know it when we feel it.) So perhaps self-indulgence is not the problem with these albums at all, and they are rather merely lacking in other qualities for balance.

Last week, I was going to write about my expectations for The Mars Volta’s latest offering, Noctourniquet. That piece probably would have been mostly the same as this one at this point. From here, though, it might have gone something like:

“My patience has been thoroughly tried, and I face the prospect of discarding a band that was at one time closer to my head and heart than any before or since.”

I’ve stopped caring about bands before when their releases ran off the rails – as I’m sure you have as well –and there are a couple, like Coheed & Cambria, that I feel I can give one last chance, but to be facing that prospect of a band I loved as hard as The Mars Volta was quite a heart-ache for me.

My girlfriend had taken to barbing, “You just wish they were on drugs again, don’t you?” (For the record, I really don’t.) It was an interesting comment to me, because it revealed me for the stereotypical fan that I was, yearning for the days of old rather than future.

There were these fans and their common suggestions on the message boards about where the band had gone wrong. That they needed to stop self-producing, or that they needed to simplify their song-writing -- which didn’t work for Octahedron, I’ll point out -- or somehow just be as they were in the De-loused days.

What Noctourniquet proves is that a band constantly reinventing itself and moving away from every suggestion a fan can make can still result in something wonderful. A return to form doesn’t necessarily have to sound like anything that came before it.

In this case, it can sound more fucking bizarre than anything they’ve done before, and yet... not. It’s rock, it’s punk, it’s got a bit of synth going on, it’s – gasp – self-indulgent, but what it’s captured more than the three albums before it is a sense of actual feeling and attitude.

So was that the key? What made this album different? Well, Rodriguez-Lopez attempted to let go of the reins and allow collaboration as much as he could allow*, and Bixler-Zavala quasi-famously took over a year to refine and complete his vocal parts, much to Rodriguez-Lopez’s chagrin.

Rodriguez-Lopez strikes me as a man who writes, records, and then moves on. While I don’t doubt his attention to detail or dedication for the minutest of seconds, I seriously doubt the last few albums have been allowed to breathe and evolve on their own before being committed to tape. (Yes, tape.) I doubt I’ll mind at all where or how weird The Mars Volta go from here as long as they learn the valuable lesson here.

But then, the next album might be written and recorded in two weeks as a thank-you present to Rodriguez-Lopez and be just as fantastic, and we realise we were the ones in need of the valuable lesson.

As critics and listeners, we have our theories, but when has music been truly quantifiable? We don’t really know a damned thing. If we or the musicians we listen to had any real clue, if we could see some kind of formula, every album would be great, and wouldn’t that be boring.

For today, faith restored. Noctourniquet is ahead of the curve. It’s recaptured some glory by running head-first to the future.

The heart-ache is gone.

* This was my understanding of the situation at the time of writing. However, it was since made clear that Rodriguez-Lopez was still in dictatorial mode while writing and recording Noctourniquet and that the band's next album is expected to be the more collaborative effort.