[atlantaprog] Re: Prog in NY Times (via Mars Volta)

On Feb 27, 2005, at 3:52 PM, Simon Jester wrote:

Can you cut and paste the article?

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:25:41 -0500, Allen Welty-Green
<agmedia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/27/arts/music/27pare.html?


Strike Up the Band in 13/4 Time: Progressive Rock Returns

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Ross Halfin/Idols
<x-tad-smaller>The El Paso band Mars Volta, at the Dodge Theater in Phoenix last summer, left. It's part of the progressive resurgence, despite its protestations.


</x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller> By JON PARELES
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Published: February 27, 2005
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T'S no wonder progressive rock was nearly laughed out of business when punk rock came along. With its album-length suites and cosmic philosophizing, its quasi-classical pomp and showy instrumental interludes, prog rock was long-winded, pretentious, cerebral, fastidiously technical and decidedly self-indulgent - all of which suddenly became no-nos as punk attacked all the ways rock had grown hifalutin and out of touch in the 1970's. Prog had been nerdy all along, the province of musicians and fans who could get all excited about a meter change or a dissonant guitar line. And punk destroyed any hopes that prog might have harbored of gaining cachet to match its elevated ambitions.

But prog is now resurfacing, not only among the diehards who never let go of it - bands like Rush and Dream Theater, labels like Cuneiform Records - but also for younger musicians and fans. Radiohead's most recent albums brought the grandeur of progressive rock back into the Top 10, while the college circuit supports bands as diversely proggy as Coheed and Cambria, which sounds like outtakes from old Rush albums, and the stately, largely instrumental bands Mogwai and Sigur Ros. This week the Mars Volta, a band from El Paso that is prog-rock despite its members' protestations, releases its second more-or-less concept album, "Frances the Mute" (Gold Standard Laboratories/Strummer/Universal).

Until recently, neither fans nor mockers admitted that progressive rock could also provide some of the same thrills - speed, whipsaw changes, sheer pummeling impact - as punk. That's why many of prog's musical twists migrated elsewhere in the 1980's and 1990's: the odd meters to hardcore and thrash metal, the dissonance to primitivist art rock, the convoluted song structures to indie rock and its proud subset of math rock.

Prog may have been hopelessly uncool, but it was nothing if not alternative. Despite its brainy reputation, at its core it was a rebellion against ordinary pop. By any objective reckoning, it was also deeply demented. Who, after all, would labor over a suite in 13/4 time pondering the meaning of free will when the way to gigs and hits was with catchy love songs?

Dementia reigns, to good effect, in the Mars Volta. The band was formed in 2001 by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler Zavala, two former members of At the Drive-In, a college-circuit emo band that fissioned on the verge of wider recognition. (Three other members formed Sparta.) Its first full-length album, "De-Loused in the Comatorium" in 2003, was conceived as the visionary deathbed fantasies of a comatose man. "Frances the Mute" grew out of a diary, found by a band member, of an adopted man seeking his biological parents, and its five extended, multipart songs are named after characters from the diary.

That's according to the band's Web site. True to prog-rock precedent, the lyrics are both copious and hermetic. The Mars Volta's singer and lyricist, Mr. Bixler Zavala, spews streams of consciousness in English and Spanish. They are not for the squeamish: "Behind the snail secretion leaves a dry heave that absorbs a limbless procreation." It would take more than a decoder ring to decipher a storyline on "Frances the Mute," though there are glimmers: "I won't forget who I'm looking for/Oh mother help me," the singer moans in "L'Via L'Viaquez."

Ancestry matters in the music on "Frances the Mute" - both the band's musical precursors and the band members' mixture of Anglo and Hispanic roots. But as with the adopted man in the songs, inheritance means less than its unkempt present-day transformations. The 1970's legacy defines the opening moments of the album, with 12-string guitar and an echoey high voice singing dreamily about "the ocean floor," proving that the Mars Volta has been listening to Led Zeppelin and Yes. Throughout the album, Mr. Bixler Zavala's high tenor veers between Robert Plant's blue wails and Jon Anderson's eunuch harmonies, and the bottom-scraping crunch of Juan Alderete de la Peña's bass lines also echoes Yes. But unlike some latter-day prog-rock the Mars Volta won't be mistaken for anything from the 20th century.

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