Album Review--The Mars Volta "The Bedlam in Goliath"

The Mars Volta came up a while back in Mr. Trend’s post on bad prog album covers. While, admittedly, a lot of those covers were pretty silly and excessive, a lot of the music is really good. Anyway, The Mars Volta was represented on the list by their album “De-loused in the Comatorium,” an excellent debut with one of the best album openings I’ve heard. They’ve moved forward from that and their music has only gotten better over the years. More complicated, for sure, but they’ve stayed fairly true to their original sound, only adding to the thick production without subtracting from it. While they only released “Amputechture” in ‘06, they have come back in early ’08 with their fourth album, “The Bedlam in Goliath.” It doesn’t deviate far from the sound of earlier albums, but the focus on this one has changed again to give another side of this fantastically talented band.

Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala comes screaming out of the gate in the opener, “Aberinkula,” and this is the tone for the entire album. This is definitely the heaviest all around release from them and, for that reason alone, I’m enjoying the hell out of it. While songwriter and producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez has often worked in the soft-loud-soft paradigm a lot of modern rock has used, “Bedlam” is loud-loud-loud. There are a few softer bits here and there but, as on “Tourniquet Man,” these parts work more as interludes between harder and more difficult passages. Bixler-Zavala is constantly in his highest register singing his bafflingly obscure lyrics and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, now the regular studio stand-in for Rodriguez-Lopez, screams doing the intricate, heavy guitar work that he’s always been most at home with. New drummer Thomas Pridgen does a lot to tie the songs together better than they ever have been. Latin rhythms fused with standard rock drumming fits The Mars Volta like a glove, and they’ve made their most explosive album in “The Bedlam in Goliath.”

There is still a lot of self-indulgence in The Mars Volta, but I’ve never really seen a problem with that. It’s a lot better to me that the pandering, fan-indulgent garbage I’m used to hearing. The fact is that they’ve continued doing exactly what they want, surprisingly staying on Universal Records, and are making rock like nobody else. I don’t think any single one of their best songs is on this album, and it’s not my favorite (yet, at least, the more I listen to each of their records, the more they each grow on me) but, from top to bottom, “The Bedlam in Goliath” is their most consistent work yet. I’m not sure I see where they go from here, but I never have been able to and they’ve always surprised me. Highly recommended and the best album released thus far in 2008.