THE BEDLAM IN GOLIATH

It's quite difficult to size up this new Mars Volta record. On the one hand, I'm tempted to speculate that the record's more aggressive tone is the result of Omar Rodriquez-Lopez' conscious decision to win back the approval of the punk/hard-rock fans who cried foul over the more subtle and mysterious Amputechture. That, along with a promotional video game and a recent appearance on the David Letterman show, paint the picture of a formerly aloof group practically begging for acceptance.

But actually listening to The Bedlam in Goliath, I'm left with another thought: Holy cr*p, this is one evil, rocking BEAST of an album.

It's also difficult to size up The Mars Volta as a typical prog-rock entity, because while they do invite certain comparisons to King Crimson, they really aren't---or have tried to be---one kind of music or another. They've never had both feet in prog, or punk, or psychedelia, or salsa, or *anything,* and as there are no other bands toying with such strange hybrids, there are no other terms on which to measure their artistic success or failure except their own.

So far, fan reactions to this album have been mixed. Their best since 'Deloused in the Comatorium'! insist some (a claim that has become as cliched as declaring every new David Bowie album as being 'his best since 'Scary Monsters!' and which simultaneously backhands their other two excellent albums). No hooks! gripes others (although complaining that TMV doesn't dole out enough pop hooks is like going to a Mexican restaurant and bitching that there are no chocolate-chip pancakes on the menu).

What their music shares with prog is a fondness for odd meters, and formal structures that explode the confines of the verse-chorus-verse pop song. Oftentimes the harmonic structures suggest the dark, knotty dissonances of Starless and Bible Black-era King Crimson, undergirding the kind of heavy pentatonic riffing that classic-prog guitarists like Fripp and Steve Howe turned up their noses at 40 years ago. Conversely, their music is busy but not necessarily virtuosic. It is only by America's post-grunge era standard, when instrumental prowess virtually disappeared altogether from rock music, which makes TMV appear to be a highly chops-y band. Full-on prog groups, from Yes to Dream Theater, could still play circles around The Mars Volta, if that were the whole game.

The thing is, The Mars Volta play with a fury that you can *feel,* which transcends the pristine technical achievements of their prog-rock forebears. Their music is sweaty, bloody, haunted, spastic.

Roughly speaking, if Caravanserai-era Santana were to cover the first Captain Beyond album, or if King Crimson were to cover Interstellar Overdrive, both under the influence of violent hallucinogens, that's a good starting point for describing The Mars Volta. Except that they never sound in any way retro...

But anyway... what about the new album?

The Bedlam in Goliath front-loads its most physically intense moments---the first track literally screams in your face from the moment it begins, and one track after another assaults the listener with maniacal intensity. Interestingly, much of this intensity comes directly and solely from the band's new drummer, Thomas Pridgen. This guy is *blindingly* proficient and virtually does all of the work for the band in detonating one musical idea after another. It is only towards the second half of the album where the explosions occur only intermittently and the band re-enters the textural and atmospheric terrain they opened up on their previous album, Amputechture. It is in these less ferocious moments where the drummer seems unsure of how to handle the material. The same heroic bursts of primal energy that Pridgen unleashes on Goliath and Cavalettas result in overplaying on the more subdued groove of Ilyana, and he sounds rather lost in the slow five-four pulse of the otherwise gorgeously realized Soothsayer. The band gets a second wind in the last minutes of Conjugal Burns, but after the frantic onslaught of the first half of the record and the hypnotic lethargy of the penultimate Soothsayer, one gets the impression of a band out-of-breath, stopping to collect itself before making that last sprint toward the finish line.

The longer tracks (for the first time in the band's full-length discography, no song on the album exceeds ten minutes) share more in common with the long tracks on Amputechture in that they feel more mosaic in structure---the organic flow and natural momentum of the longer tracks on Deloused are traded for more abrupt, random juxtapositions which may or may not--in fact, let's just stick with may not---have any intrinsic musical relation to its adjacent sections.

The only problems The Mars Volta have had, in actuality, stem from having set the bar so high for themselves in the first place. Their first album was an exhilarating shock to the fanbase of their previous agit-punk band, At the Drive-In, but with each successive record being judged more harshly than the one before it, they find themselves in the same quandary that many progressive bands discovered: How can a band re-invent the wheel every time they enter the studio? Stand in the same ground you already broke, and you're accused of becoming formulaic. Keep trying to innovate, and you're accused of disappearing up your own ass. How do you please fans who want things to be familiar enough to get an instant grip on, AND exploratory enough to make them feel they are with the band on the cutting edge?

Philosophically, I'm not sure if The Bedlam in Goliath is going to answer any of those questions.

Viscerally and musically, however, this is an absolutely stunning, killer album.