Mars Volta It never worked as expected. Instead, the band’s story is as complex and whimsical as its music.
For ten years the band was mostly quiet. But the new self-titled studio album is the result of a long-running (sometimes estranged) collaboration between singer-lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer Omar Rodriguez Lopez. Bringing the latest transformation of the music that was played. We have been friends since childhood and now both he is 47 years old. On “The Mars Volta,” released September 16, the group, long known for their cryptic polysyllabic lyrics and extended, transformative song structures, are open and open in their own quirky ways. Pop brevity.
“Some of these songs are a more direct representation of what you should be feeling,” Bixler-Zavala said in an interview from his Los Angeles home. “A lot of other Mars on his Volta records will sometimes do. But more often you’ll be confronted with this complete sci-fi riddle. Now I’m going to talk about what’s going on.” I’m just there.”
Over the past decade, Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala have been very prolific, both separately and together. Rodríguez-López has released over 20 of his solo albums, with a constantly changing list of collaborators. He also worked with Bixler-Zavala in the band Antemasque and was in the reunion of their group At the Drive-In, a Texas post-hardcore band that preceded Mars His Volta. They formed the band in El Paso in 1994, broke up in 2001, and reunited in 2012 and he in 2016.
Each project was a new musical turn. Rodriguez Lopez said in a video interview from Bacalar, Mexico, “The basic principle is that I’m just grateful for the opportunity to explore. He directed a film there before returning to the United States, and even in the heat of August, he was dressed entirely in black.
At the Drive-In built a reputation for fast, wry songs rooted in punk. But then Mars Volta veered toward abstract notions, veering into expanded and eclectic compositions of psychedelia and progressive rock, sometimes mingled with the salsa that Rodriguez Lopez grew up listening to. Some Mars Volta songs with cryptic titles such as “Esp” and “Tetragrammaton” were over 10 minutes long.
The Mars Volta toured Europe in 2012 after releasing their sixth album Noctouniket. However, in January 2013, Bixler-Zavala suddenly announced the dissolution of the band in a series of angry Twitter messages.
“I can no longer sit here and pretend. I am no longer a member of the Mars Volta.” Bixler Zavala I wrote then“For the record, I did my best to get Noctourniquet’s full-scale North American tour, but Omar didn’t want to. Rodríguez-López has already started another project, Bosnian Rainbows.” was
“When I left the band, I was in a really impatient place. Very immature and yelling on social media,” recalls Bixler-Zavala. “It was just like a brat.”
He and Rodriguez Lopez reconciled months later, but the Mars Volta was no longer on the agenda. Instead, they created a simpler rock his album as his Antemasque and revived At the Drive-In in 2016 — among Rodríguez-López’s many solo his recordings. The band made the album in the style of the 1990s.Interalia,Rodriguez Lopez was sick of it.
“The At the Drive-In thing was very limited,” he said. “It was part of the nostalgia and the past and where we came from and our roots. There are certain expectations and certain things that have to be given, and the parameters are very set.” -López adds: Is the sound coming back through the speakers something that makes me dance? “
Rodríguez-López didn’t want to return to the brisk, jarring, head-spinning music that Mars Volta was making until 2012. The Mars Volta and more positively, it’s all on the same frequency, right? The two guitars, the cymbals, Cedric’s voice are all on the same frequency, fighting all night, every day,” he said. . “I was exhausted from touring, I had just started making tracks, and I was so saturated with other things that I wanted to do something else. What we haven’t done: Cut things down and do our version of pop.”
Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante recorded with Rodríguez-López and listened to Mars Volta’s album production process. “A lot of the time when fusion he’s a musician or progressive he’s a musician trying to simplify and do something more pop, it’s really boring,” he said in his FaceTime conversation. “People who think it takes a lot of notes to fully express themselves, or who think they need to go in all these different directions, now focus the music so much and focus it all on the song. When you really look into music, this is as complex as anything they’ve ever done, but it’s an emotional journey beyond anything they’ve ever done. It has depth.”
Bixler-Zavala recalled that Rodríguez-López brought up the possibility of a more pop song around 2008. He said. “I was very comfortable and used to making very long songs and being labyrinthine and stuff like that. And I just couldn’t figure it out.”
But now, more than a decade later, Rodríguez-López’s new track has made room for Bixler-Zavala’s melody, Acoustic experiment for headphones to a bystander. at different moments, steely danTame Impala, Trap, Salsa, band.
The music reminded Bixler-Zavala of songwriters like Peter Gabriel and David Bowie who brought progressive rock ideas to pop in the 1970s. “We’re looking for gray areas that are just starting to pop, but their old selves are still there,” he said.
The primary in-person collaboration for “The Mars Volta” took place during a ten-day recording session at Rodriguez Lopez’s rented Los Angeles home. He had nearly 40 tracks of his that he performed for Bixler-Zavala, writing lyrics and recording vocals in no time. “I’m just looking for something that he naturally responds to,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “Those things will remain true to the end.”
For The Mars Volta, the move to pop didn’t mean happy love songs or cheery slogans. The band’s new songs, like their past catalog, are filled with paranoia, resentment, lamentation, and thoughts of destruction and betrayal. On “Flash Burns From Flashbacks,” over a splashing stop-start beat and a backwards-running guitar, Bixler-Zavala asks, “Push the hoax and drill the script/teleprompter or polygraph?” sing.
Many of the lyrics are Lawsuits filed in 2019 Bixler-Zavala’s wife, Chrissie Carnell Bixler, and three other women have accused actor Danny Masterson of rape and accused the Church of Scientology of stalking, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress“The Lord knows I have something to write about,” said Bixler-Zavala.
The song contains repeated references to court proceedings, surveillance and harassment. Bixler-Zavala was so concerned about computer hacking that he and his Rodríguez-López moved to the cloud instead of using his storage where he would send each other songs in progress on CDs. “If I were you, I wouldn’t answer the door/It’s 2 a.m.,” Bixler-Zavala sings on “Shore Story,” a stubborn, slow ballad laced with suspense.
After a decade between albums, Mars Volta have made their latest discovery: strategic restraint. “Give yourself a discipline that limits certain things, and it opens up other things within the track,” said Rodriguez Lopez. “You don’t have to play everything all the time.”