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

Here's the whole article-- good stuff. February 27, 2005Strike Up the Band in 
13/4 Time: Progressive Rock ReturnsBy JON PARELES 

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.

The closest it comes is in the album's low point (and single), "The Widow," 
which may be trying to placate radio programmers by offering three mintes of 
chest-heaving Led Zeppelin homage. But on the album, the band finishes the 
track with a tangent: an additional two minutes of woozy, abstract keyboards. 

More often, the music combines the kitchen-sink inclusiveness of psychedelia 
with the swerves and jolts of the hip-hop era, to approach the ravenous 
eclecticism of Latin alternative rock. The Mars Volta embraces musicianly 
complexities, showing off virtuosity by revving the songs up to frenetic 
tempos. But it rejects the compulsive neatness that classically trained 
musicians brought to prog-rock in the 1970's.

A big part of the difference is that punk and hip-hop have trained rock to look 
for the vulgar before the cosmic. The Mars Volta's songs are expansive, but 
they're not ethereal. Technical feats like the ones the Mars Volta pulls off in 
every song can make music seem like a purer, cleaner realm, an escape from 
imperfect reality. But not in these songs. As the band's producer, Mr. 
Rodriguez-Lopez keeps the songs raggedly and aggressively concrete. He uses 
guitar distortion, horn sections, sound effects and what sounds like the 
manipulation of old-fashioned recording tape to match the music to the 
near-toxic atmosphere of the lyrics. 

Clashes, mutations and sudden leaps fill the songs, which can linger for long 
minutes over an (odd-meter) vamp and one of Mr. Omar-Rodriguez's jabbing guitar 
solos or switch instantly between disparate styles. "L'Via L'Viaquez" moves 
between two characters, two languages, two voices (a clarion, paranoid wail in 
Spanish and a furtive whisper in English), and two musical idioms: bruising, 
accelerating funk behind the Spanish, which warns of death threats and 
vengeance, and a slow, deliberate Latin vamp behind the English, urging, "Don't 
be afraid." To scramble expectations further, the Latin stretches feature Larry 
Harlow, a pianist who was an essential member of the 1970's salsa supergroup 
the Fania All-Stars. 

That kind of willfulness fills the album. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy 
Anymore" starts with a full minute of chirping birds (or crickets) before 
gradually drifting into a mournful waltz with hints of both early King Crimson 
and mariachi horns. 

And lest anyone doubt the band's affinity for the old-fashioned epic, the 
longest song on "Frances the Mute" is also the album's tour de force. For most 
of its 32 minutes, "Cassandra Geminni" hurtles ahead on a tightly wound, 
breakneck guitar riff; its first section is called "Tarantism," named for the 
uncontrollable urge to dance supposedly caused by a tarantula's bite. Mr. 
Bixler Zavala sings about birth, darkness and destruction; guitars and bass 
work in contrapuntal patterns, strings and horns pile into the mix, the song 
dissolves into free jazz and reappears. It's wildly, glorious excessive, 
indulging the prog-rock impulses that are simply too ecstatic for rock to leave 
behind. 
 

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