On January 24th this year, via a series of tweets, Cedric Bixler-Zavala quit The Mars Volta. After almost 11 years, six albums and an EP, the duo of singer Bixler-Zavala and guitarist/producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez was over. Considering the two had also spent the better part of a decade at the helm of seminal post-hardcore band At the Drive-In, taking to Twitter to announce the end of a musical partnership surpassing 20 years seemed pretty indignant.
But for anyone who remembers hearing Deloused In The Comatorium back in 2003, or indeed anyone who has heard or witnessed The Mars Volta or At the Drive-In live, it should come as no surprise that it all ended in a single fiery moment. It’s right there in the music: these are not patient people.
Calmer minds could not have concocted the iconic record. The debut album from The Mars Volta celebrates its tenth birthday this week, and as such we take a look at this sprawling debut from one of the twenty-first century’s most forward-thinking, creative and generally fucking out-there bands.
But to understand Deloused, we have to go back a little further to the demise of At the Drive-In.
After the release of their seminal album Relationship Of Command in 2000, At the Drive-In made their first trip to Australia in January 2001 for the Big Day Out. Though fellow artists and commentators hailed them as one of the year’s highlights, it would be their hostile Sydney performance which they would be remembered for, and which foreshadowed the band’s impending end. Antagonising the audience for crowd-surfing, the band played only three songs before storming off stage. Barely a month followed before the band disbanded, citing the “complete mental and physical exhaustion” of its members.
“Doing battle is the right way to put it, as most every song on Deloused feels at war with itself.”They had just begun to find commercial success, topping critics’ end of year lists after almost a decade of living in a tour-van and scratching a living from minuscule album and merch sales. But creative differences within the band and Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez’s weighty drug addictions caused a split within the ranks, with the afro-d pair forming The Mars Volta through their de-facto band (called Defacto) while the remaining At the Drive-In members formed Sparta.
Enlisting the help of sound technician and vocal effect-looper Jeremy Ward, drummer Jon Theodore, bassist Eva Gardner and keyboardist Isaiah (Ikey) Owens, the band released their debut EP Tremulant in April 2002. It garnered decent critical praise, with Pitchfork claiming “just know that this EP heralds good things on the horizon.” However, by all accounts, their early shows were manic and more often than not, shit. You could put it down to the ambitious new material, but the fact that “both Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez had begun shooting dope and smoking crack at an increasingly alarming rate” might have had more to do with it.
Not that it slowed down their progress in the studio. On the back of the small success of their initial EP, the band found themselves signed to Universal records, and had enlisted superstar producer Rick Rubin to helm the sessions.
The album was recorded in LA, starting at noon and finishing around two in the morning. When original bassist Eva Gardner left, the band enlisted the help of Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea to learn and record the bass parts in just three days. They’d also grab his former Chili Peppers bandmate John Frusciante to throw in a guitar solo during the expansive middle section of the twelve minute “Cicatriz E.S.P”.
There’s a great cinematic quality to Deloused In The Comatorium. Bixler-Zavala has stated that the band’s biggest influences are filmmakers, and on Deloused that influence is palpable. Opening with the enticing “Son Et Lumiere”, Bixlar-Zavala begins the story with “I need sanctuary in the pages of this book”, his voice mutated, sounding somewhere between a robot and drowning man, he continues; ”gestating with all the other rats…I am of pockmarked shapes/ the vermin you need to loathe.”
Deloused was intended as a long-awaited eulogy for Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala’s former friend Julio Venegas. The El Paso artist was dangerously free-spirited, reported to have been covered in cuts, bruises and welts from self-abuse and recreational shooting up of rat-poison. After his death from a morphine overdose in 1996, Bixlar-Zavala penned a short story which would eventually go on to shape the lyrics of Deloused.
The story follows Cerpin Taxt, a “hero [who] tries to commit suicide by overdosing on morphine. Instead of dying, he falls into a coma for a week, and experiences fantastic adventures in his dreams, elemental battles between the good and bad aspects of his conscience. At the end, he emerges from the coma, but chooses to die.”
Doing battle is the right way to put it, as most every song on Deloused feels at war with itself. There are moments of sheer conscious ferocity, and others of extended unconscious freeform noise meanderings. The dynamics are at an extreme, with the album often feeling like a nightmarish rollercoaster, in which the music could go in any and every direction.
The one-two punch of the ferocious “Inertiatic E.S.P” and “Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)” are the first indications of The Mars Volta’s subsequent modus operandi. Both combine Rodriguez-Lopez’s signature atonal guitar licks with layer upon layer of Bixler-Zavala’s screeching tenor, atop a punishing rhythm section. Both songs go in a myriad of directions, but somehow manage to remain compellingly cohesive.
“Drunkship Of Lanterns” is propelled by a frenetic Afro-Cuban beat which, along with the choir of Bixler Zavala vocals create a wormhole of hypnotic tension, building until the song collapses underneath itself at the four minute mark, only to spring back to life for a pummeling final chorus.
“Televators” is a somber, suicidal ballad, steeped in haunting lines like “one day this chalk outline will circle this city.” It’s the closest the band gets to a straightforward song, but it’s best appreciated as part of the whole, like a chapter in a story.
There are moments of tangible emotions amidst the maelstrom of perverted imagery. On “Eria Tarka” Bixler-Zavala questions “is this wrong? Feels so wrong”, while the “now I’m lost” chorus of “Inertiatic E.S.P” feels like the strongest moment of clarity on the album.
If the pair were feeling penciled in and confined under the post-hardcore of At The Drive-In, it’s clear that on Deloused they felt free to follow any musical whim. With its dizzying amount of schizophrenic ideas, what’s most amazing is that the album retains any sense of cohesion whatsoever. But, even more than that, the album flows together as a seamless piece. Between the lengthy guitar and effects noodling, there are plenty of unifying features. Jon Theodore’s bombastic rhythms which sound like John Bonham on meth; Rodriguez-Lopez’s dissonant guitar spasms; and of course Bixler-Zavala’s shrieking tenor.
Bixler-Zavala hadn’t been the most straightforward lyricist in At The Drive-In. But on Deloused, with its almost entirely subconscious narrative, he had free reign to offer up chorus hooks like “exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed” or nonsensical phrases such as “transient jet lag ecto mimed bison” in the same song.
There are plenty who’ll argue the exact moments in which the album veers from its intended course and into sheer indulgence; whether it’s the three-pronged guitar solos which take up a third of the twelve-minute “Cicatriz E.S.P”, or the outro to “This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed”, in which the entire song is thrown into reverse for thirty-odd seconds for no real reason.
Despite being so damn strange, and despite progressive rock being entirely unhip, Deloused became a certifiable hit. Released on June 24th 2003, it peaked at #39 on the billboard charts, and has gone on to sell over 500 000 copies.
“One particularly memorable declaration in defence of the band was “If you don’t like The Mars Volta, you don’t deserve to have an opinion.”“It was critically acclaimed at the time of its release, with critics likening them to King Crimson, Led Zeppelin, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Can, and Santana, and praising the album’s sheer ambition. Alternative Press gave the album a perfect score, claiming it “…takes multiple listens to absorb, and, even then, you’re probably not going to have a clue to what Bixler’s raving about”, while Dot Music praised the album’s sheer force of will, “it insists on taking over your life for an hour, demands a level of concentration rare in rock, amply repays multiple plays.
Barely a month before the album’s release, their sound technician Jeremy Ward died of a heroin overdose. Having just finished an album indebted to a friend who had also passed away on account of drugs, it was an all too telling omen. Ward’s death was the catalyst for both Rodriguez-Lopz and Bixler-Zavala quitting drugs.
However, the band’s live shows had become no less manic since Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala got clean, just more consistent. Known for sprawling five or six songs across multiple-hour sets, the great gift of their live shows was knowing that because of their penchant for improvisation, the audience would always be hearing something new. As such the band became one of the world’s most captivating live acts, visiting Australia no less than six times throughout their career.
“Nothing about the album should have worked. But through sheer scope and ambition, The Mars Volta made believers of everyone.”
Their subsequent albums furthered their sprawling mix of Latin, jazz, fusion and psychedelia, with Frances The Mute, Amputechture, and The Bedlam In Goliath each stretching their running time past seventy-five minutes.
However, over time their penchant for increased musicality overshadowed a dynamic, melodic and thematic core which came fully realised on Deloused. Every subsequent release was met with less enthusiasm from critics, and sales gradually subsided.
However, The Mars Volta had already earned themselves one of the most devout fan followings, which rendered slipping sales irrelevant. Their fan page and its 35 000 strong forum The Comatorium was one of unflinching religious devotion to the band. One particularly memorable declaration in defence of the band was “if you don’t like The Mars Volta, you don’t deserve to have an opinion.”
Released at the height of the new garage rock explosion, in which less was more, Deloused In The Comatorium was the utter antithesis of this new rock revival. Steeped in utterly daggy latin-infused prog rock, overwrought with a dense jungle of guitars, loops and effects, all the while connected by Bixler-Zavala’s glass-shattering vocals delivering stream-of-consciousness rubbish; nothing about the album should have worked. But through sheer scope and ambition, The Mars Volta made believers of everyone.
One of the most startling debut albums in history, Deloused In The Comatorium stands as a testament to unbridled creativity. In a maelstrom of chemically induced hysteria, and having just shunned mainstream success with their previous band, two self-confessed ‘fuck-ups’ from El Paso, Texas had finally made it by throwing every musical whim into a cauldron to create music which truly hadn’t been heard before, and likely won’t again.
