The Bedlam in Goliath
Thomas Pridgen recently became the new drummer for the band. He joined them at the March 12th show in New Zealand, where the band debuted the song known as "Idle Tooth" on the band's setlists, which later appears as "Wax Simulacra" in Bixler-Zavala's on stage lyric booklet.
After shows in New Zealand and Australia, The Mars Volta toured a few West Coast venues as the headliner, then entered the studio to record the fourth LP entitled The Bedlam in Goliath.[10] In a recent interview with "Time Off" magazine, Bixler-Zavala stated that the next album would be a concept album: "I dont want to give the plot away right now, but the new one has to do with this gift that Omar found for me when he went traveling once. The gift came with a story that was attached to it, and were trying to re-interpret the story again."[11] Planned for release around the same time as the new album (January 29th, 2008) is a live concert DVD shot by director Jorge Hernandez Aldana of one of their most recent Australian performances.[12]
Omar was in a curio shop in Jerusalem when he found the Soothsayer. It seemed to him an ideal gift for Cedric, this archaic Ouija-style talking board. So it was then and there, in a city where the air swims with religious fervor, in a shop that might as well have carried monkeys paws and Mogwais, that Omar changed the fate of The Mars Volta forever.
Had he known at that moment that the boards history stretched far beyond its novelty appearance, that its very fibers were soaked through with something terribly other, that the choral death and desire of a multi-headed Goliath was waiting behind its gates
well, he might have left it at rest there on the dusty shelves.
More on that in a moment.
Back up to the last big tour. The Volta and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are tearing venues in half, retreating to their busses, rolling through the night. But instead of the normal Rock God routines the guys are sitting around Cedrics new Ouija board, which theyve dubbed the Soothsayer. And they love it its the new post-show addiction.
The Soothsayer offers them names: Goliath, Mr. Mugs, Patience Worth, Tourniquet Man.
The Soothsayer offers them a story: Its always about a man, a woman, and her mother. About the lust floating between them. About seduction and infidelity. And pain. And eventually, murder. Entrails and absence and curses and oblivion. Exactly the kind of spooky shit youd want from your Ouija.
Now here comes the rub.
The Soothsayer starts asking the band what they have to offer. This connection thats set up runs both ways, and the invisible voices begin to speak of their appetites.
They threaten oblivion and dissolution, or offer it as seduction. The voices merge as Goliath, a metaphysical quagmire and unfed saint whose hunger to return to the real world grows more urgent with each connection.
There are proper ways to close this union, but The Mars Volta have never been anything if not adventurous. They stay in contact even taking phrases from the board and inserting them as song lyrics but never offer themselves as surrogates. And so the starving Goliath extends its influence.
Inexplicable equipment issues abound while on tour.
Conflict with the existing drummer escalates and results in a change of guard. Ritual gives way to injury and Cedric is laid low by a randomly (and severely) gimped foot.
A completely reliable engineers mental composure cracks, pushing him from the project. The tracks he leaves behind are desperately tangled.
Omars music studio floods, threatening to send him right over the same precipice as the engineer.
Long-term album delays hit and people arent sleeping well.
Nonsensical words and phrases the board had previously spoken begin to pop up in things like documentaries about mass suicide.
The Soothsayer keeps telling the same story but the details are becoming more brutal.
One day the label on the board peels back revealing pre-Aramaic lingo written across weird cone shapes.
Its bad mojo writ large, and things are crumbling quickly.
Worst of all, the board has shifted from pleas to demands.
To threats.
So they buried the fucking thing.
There are many ways to close a spiritual connection. Wear white for a whole year. Surround yourself with salt. Close a board and ask someone else to open it, thus transferring the ownership. Break the board into seven pieces and sprinkle it with holy water. Or bury it.
Omar wrapped the Soothsayer in cloth and found a proper place for it in the soil. Cedric asked that he never be made aware of its location.
And then their album found a new, more urgent purpose.
The Bedlam in Goliath is here to consecrate the grounds where the Soothsayer lies in wait. Its metaphor vs. metaphysics. Its story will be told to you and I, Lucky Listener, and were the ones re-opening the board. Taking on the ownership.
Perhaps if Goliath is spread between us all its hunger will dissipate. Or, as it threatened, it could become our epidemic.
So theres the story, up to today, but its not over. Because this thing is about to enter the hearts and minds of countless listeners. My hope is that the album will do exactly as The Mars Volta have engineered it to do, and lift the unseen burden that hangs over them.
From the opening surge of Aberinkula to the Brobdingnagian blast of Goliath to the frenzy and near escape of Conjugal Burns, The Bedlam in Goliath is the sound of a band transformed. The Volta have never been what any sane person would call restrained, but in the heat of this bedlam, in their teeth-baring cornered animal response to an invisible entropy, theyve created a truly relentless musical juggernaut.
The returning roster (Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on guitar and production, Cedric Bixler-Zavala on vocals and lyrics, Isaiah Ikey Owens on keys, Juan Alderete de la Pena on bass, Adrian Terrazas-Gonzalez on horns, Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez on percussion, Paul Hinojos on guitar and soundboard, Thomas Holy Fucking Shit This New Guy is Incredible Pridgen on drums, and Red Hot Chili Pepper/regular-Volta-album-contributor John Frusciante rounding out the guitar armada) have crafted a record that manages to contain the echoes of their considerable prior work and merge them with their uncompromising desire to carve out new territory in the musical landscape.
Wax Simulacra carries with it the energy of De-Louseds This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed and elevates the tone with frantic looped vocals and a swirling mix of horns and drum rolls. The mind-melting freak-out crescendos of tracks like Frances the Mutes Cassandra Geminni or Amputechtures Viscera Eyes have always given the Voltas albums and shows an air of transcendence, and there are moments on new tracks like Goliath and Cavelettas and Ouroboros that guarantee escalating listener paroxysms, if not Scanners-style exploding heads. The more relaxed new tracks, like Ilyena or Tourniquet Man, manage to encapsulate the strange lamentation of other Volta slow-burners while adding an eerie sense of menace. The entire Volta crew is pushing themselves further than ever before. And to anyone concerned about the arrival of a new drummer, rest at ease. The Bedlam in Goliath unveils Mr. Pridgen as a drum-pummeling berserker mainlining cheetah blood and snorting dusted mastodon bones, proving masterful with the elaborate and the explosive (and often melding both at the same time).
On the lyrical front, you should be warned: This is an unsettling piece of work. Youre welcome to take Cedrics vocals at surface level he sounds incredible, his range broader than ever, his energy and emotion undeniable.
Or you can begin to translate. Cedric Bixler-Zavala, like fellow musical mavericks Bjork and Ghostface Killah, uses primarily English words but speaks his own lyrical language. If you examine the meaning behind his shrapnel-burst imagery, his obsessions with the grotesque and the profoundly sacred, you begin to realize hes created a complex associative tapestry thats designed with spider-web precision. And before you know it youre trapped.
The more you read the story hes laid out (an intricate meta-fictional narrative reminiscent of Danielewskis House Of Leaves, involving both the transgressions of the past and the desire of the Goliath parasite to infest the Ouija-using host), the more you research his allusions and the history of the spirit board, the more uncanny connections you are bound to make. You start to recognize a tie between certain vocal effects and messages from the board. You wonder if focusing on this story too much might invite Goliath into your world. Soon youre jumping at shadows, shopping for salt and all-white outfits, surrounding yourself with graphs and counting words and letters and looking for codes, creating your own primordial cymatics using the album, feeling phantom tendrils in your bones. You begin to hope that all the positive elements Cedric covertly slid into the songs (a legion of religious references including snippets of Santeria-derived prayers, classic fables, the hidden name of a regal actress he holds in high regard, an underlying reverence for creation/menstruation, vague hints of redemption) really are helping to balance out and maybe even negate the darkness that has infested the album.
Youre bound to have questions. What exactly transpired in the tragic triangle? Who was really in control and who were the victims? Was anyone innocent? How did they die and what happened to the bodies? How did they come to rest within the Soothsayer? If they return to our world, what will they do?
Those answers (and more) are in there, fused at every level to songs of equal complexity and gravity. And the closer you listen, the further you voyage into The Bedlam in Goliath, the more disquieting and compelling the Voltas brilliant audiocelluloid epic becomes.
This album is the sound of a band playing magnificently for its life. And it is a recording of such strange power that I believe the Goliath that haunts them will be forever struck down.
