As The Mars Volta fans know, the brilliance of the music on “The Bedlam in Goliath” was almost overshadowed by the tale of the album’s creation.
The short story is that lead guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez bought a Ouija board at a trinket shop in Jerusalem and was compelled by its negative powers to write the music that became the group’s fourth album “The Bedlam in Goliath.”
“That album had a lot of information overload,” said lead singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala of the 2007 release. “It is a really busy album all the time. It’s very difficult to listen to it straight from beginning to end. The new one we just did is completely stripped down, the polar opposite.”
The group’s new as yet untitled album is really a shift that seemed natural after the duo spent a lot of time listening to classic rock ranging from The Beatles to Buddy Holly to even 1960s group The Raspberries. It’s not that the band wanted to distance itself from “Bedlam,” but the members prefer to continually take different approaches to its music.
“Hopefully it’s a smart thing to do, to just continue to move on [musically],” said Bixler-Zavala of the album, which at press time had no release date slated. “So many times people are scared [of failure] so they just do what they used to do. Our mission is not to unite all of American but to express our [musical] vision.”
Perhaps that’s why the band is so successful at attracting fans to its prog-rock sound. Just when you think the band is pigeonholed, the members take the sound in a different direction. Of course that’s nothing compared to the 20-cans-of-Red-Bull-in-a-row energy that overtakes the members during live shows.
“Well, imagine Beck in a tantrum fronting a prog-rock band,” wrote Mark Kemp of The Village Voice. “All those fancy white-boy moves from a shaggy-headed Mexican-American singer who sounds like Geddy Lee and looks like Ritchie Blackmore, circa Deep Purple Mark 1. And watch out for flying objects coming from the stage.”
To say the shows are unscripted is stating the obvious, said Rodriguez-Lopez.
“As negative as it might sound … I don’t really place a criteria on the group,” he said of the shows and the band’s sound. “Every tour is special, every show unique and we give everything we can at each one. We’re 300 percent about the audience.”
If you go:
- The Mars Volta
- Venue: Rams Head Live, 20 Market Place, Baltimore
- When: 7 p.m. Sunday
- Details: $35 Adv., $39.50 day of show
- Info.: 410-547-SEAT; www.ticketmaster.com
