The Mars Volta - Zed and Two Naughts
The Mars Volta has posted another new track from the upcoming album Noctourniquet to their SoundCloud channel. I didn’t want to get my hopes up after the first track “The Malkin Jewel” went up, but I think I’m liking the direction they’re going on this album.
The Mars Volta and At the Drive-In guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez told NME that the newly reformed At the Drive-In will not record new music together and that the decision to reunite the band was partly financial:
We’re not getting any younger and there’s been an offer of money every year. You can’t avoid that. You’d be a fool and a politician to pretend that wasn’t part of it.
He also apparently told Kerrang! magazine the same thing:
Will there be a new album? No, no, no. At The Drive-In is more of a nostalgia thing – it’s songs we wrote when we were all in our 20s and we’re doing a couple of shows.
Well I guess that clears things up a bit.
Coheed & Cambria - “Sentry the Defiant”
What was it about Valentine’s Day (and the few days surrounding it) that made so many bands show its fans some love this year? Ginger did it. The Mars Volta did it. And I just found out that Coheed & Cambria’s Claudio Sanchez did it, too—released new music that is.
Sanchez fired up his guitar cam to give us all an acoustic sneak peek at the new song he is working on for the band’s as yet untitled sixth album. The song is “Sentry the Defiant,” and the Coheed frontman says of the video version on the band’s YouTube channel, “This is literally the first time I played the song through in its entirety.” It will come as no surprise that the new release will be another concept album—does Claudio do anything else?—and will be another Amory Wars prequel set further in the past and “will hint and influence the pre-existing saga.”
My first impressions of the song? Freakin’ awesome. And how low can you tune an acoustic guitar before the strings go all flappy on you?
Enjoy!
The Mars Volta - “The Malkin Jewel”
A couple of days ago, The Mars Volta released “The Malkin Jewel” the first single from its upcoming album Noctourniquet. It sports a bit of a different sound for the band, with frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala referring to it as “future punk.”
Having previously expressed my love of the band’s full-length debut De-Loused in the Comatorium, I have to admit that I haven’t followed the band or its recent albums too closely, only liking one or two tracks and losing more interest with each subsequent release. Who knows if Noctourniquet, the music for which was recorded three years ago on the heels of Octahedron, will reverse that trend, but frankly, I’m not holding out much luck. Instead, I’m secretly hoping that the newly re-formed At the Drive-In will bring some new music that I can get excited about.
“The Malkin Jewel” took a couple of listens for me to get into, but I’m beginning to appreciated its sparseness and quirkiness—and yes, its punk-ness. If you’re digging it too, you can pre-order the album on iTunes and get an instant download of the single. Or you can pre-order at Amazon if you prefer.
Enjoy!
I absolutely love the full-length debut De-Loused in the Comatorium from The Mars Volta. With a story that that has one foot firmly planted in reality—in part based on the death of El Paso artist and friend Julio Venegas—and the other somewhere in singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s wild imagination, the former At the Drive-In frontman and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez managed to harness the intensity and inventiveness of their former band to create what I believe will forever be their finest work (I wish I could say as much for their subsequent releases, which to me, have been spotty at best).
Also hitching a ride from the ATDI days are Bixler-Zavala’s nonsensical, obtuse beat poet lyrics and Rodriguez-Lopez’s mad-scientist-like guitar noodling. The album sports a very heavily latin/jazz-influenced rhythm and feel and features RHCP wildman Flea on bass, with guest spots by John Frusciante on guitar.
I still don’t know quite what to think of a band whose lead singer slips as easily between English, Spanish, and some seemingly made-up language as I do English and Southern—yes, Southern really is a language all its own—or of a guitarist who has frequently expressed his frustration with the limitations of his main instrument’s ability to express what he hears in his head and who seems to release a solo album every other day. But I do know that if you invest the time to listen to De-Loused completely (with headphones, that’s a must) in one sitting (and it may take several listens), you’ll hopefully find it as rewarding as I do.
I would love to feature some concert footage of The Mars Volta, but their live performances just seem to frustrate me. I have witnessed a show on my cable company’s on-demand service that was pure perfection (and where the number of personnel on stage was more like a small army or sports team than a band), but Rodriguez-Lopez is just as likely to play an entire concert with his guitar wildly out of tune while Bixler-Zavala simply screams and mutters unintelligibly.
When The Mars Volta are on their game, they are a force to be reckoned with live, so maybe I’ll dig up something soon that I think is worth showing, but for now I leave you with the music video for the first single from the album, “Inertiatic ESP.”
Enjoy!
