The Mars Volta - The Bedlam In Goliath

Krilons Resa

Jerry's married?!
Nov 7, 2002
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Inside dorian's gym bag.
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This new Mars Volta album is fucking AWESOME. Holy shit. I havent been a fan of anything they have done since De-Loused In The Comatorium. This new one is more song oriented and focused, yet flows beautifully, like De-Loused but gone further from the elements on their other albums. I am officially a Mars Volta fan again. This is sick. :kickass::kickass::kickass:
 
Maybe, but you mate haven't been a fan of anything after their debut, and "Frances..." is what actually made me absolutely fall in love with this band, so our cases are different. Then again if you are right in the end for me too, then hoorah for that.
 
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 don’t 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 we’re 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 monkey’s paws and Mogwais, that Omar changed the fate of The Mars Volta forever.
Had he known at that moment that the board’s 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 Cedric’s new Ouija board, which they’ve dubbed the Soothsayer. And they love it— it’s the new post-show addiction.
The Soothsayer offers them names: Goliath, Mr. Mugs, Patience Worth, Tourniquet Man.
The Soothsayer offers them a story: It’s 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 you’d want from your Ouija.
Now here comes the rub.
The Soothsayer starts asking the band what they have to offer. This connection that’s 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 engineer’s mental composure cracks, pushing him from the project. The tracks he leaves behind are desperately tangled.
Omar’s music studio floods, threatening to send him right over the same precipice as the engineer.
Long-term album delays hit and people aren’t 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.
It’s 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. It’s metaphor vs. metaphysics. Its story will be told to you and I, Lucky Listener, and we’re 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 there’s the story, up to today, but it’s 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, they’ve 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-Loused’s 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 Mute’s Cassandra Geminni or Amputechture’s Viscera Eyes have always given the Volta’s 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. You’re welcome to take Cedric’s 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 he’s created a complex associative tapestry that’s designed with spider-web precision. And before you know it you’re trapped.
The more you read the story he’s laid out (an intricate meta-fictional narrative reminiscent of Danielewski’s 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 you’re 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.
You’re 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 Volta’s 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.
 
Seriously, this is fucking brilliant. I was at Best Buy this morning as soon as they opened the doors to get my grubby hands on this. I haven't done that in a LONG time. Every track seamlessly flows into each other too. I know we are only 4 weeks into '08, but I wouldn't be surprised if this album made my #1 spot of the year. It's that fucking good.

The CD came with a DVD too and some code thingamujig to get 2 bonus tracks from their site.
 
Seriously, this is fucking brilliant. I was at Best Buy this morning as soon as they opened the doors to get my grubby hands on this. I haven't done that in a LONG time. Every track seamlessly flows into each other too. I know we are only 4 weeks into '08, but I wouldn't be surprised if this album made my #1 spot of the year. It's that fucking good.

The CD came with a DVD too and some code thingamujig to get 2 bonus tracks from their site.

That's what you said about The Ocean, and yet theirs didn't even make your Top 10. :Smug:

Doomcifer said:
I'll put money on the fact that the new drummer is one of the most amazing drummers you have ever heard.

How much? :rolleyes:



;)
 
I'll check it out, but you DID rave about that new Ocean album, which ended up sucking, so your ass is on the line.
 
As origin stories go, this one's a doozy. While on tour, The Mars Volta bought a ouija board at at Jerusalem curio shop. The band used the board as a game, part of its after-show wind-down ritual. Then, according to guitarist and songwriter Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, things got strange.

Through the board, the same spirits started visiting night after night. Their communications partially inspired the lyrics — and even the sounds — The Mars Volta was developing for its new album.

When the band went to the studio to record, chaos ensued. Rodriguez-Lopez says the messages coming through the ouija board got scary. The studio flooded. There were a series of equipment malfunctions. Fearing that the spirits were behind the problems, Rodriguez-Lopez says he broke and buried the board so the group could finish the album. It sounds preposterous, but spend some time with The Bedlam in Goliath and the paranormal visitations begin to seem almost plausible.

At times, it seems The Mars Volta is getting assistance from some of music heaven's luminaries. On the eight-minute headspinner "Metatron," there are collisions of instruments Charles Ives would love, and hiccuping odd-meter hijinks straight out of the Frank Zappa songbook. In a heartbeat, The Mars Volta can go from super-fast rock into a prayer-meeting gospel groove that could have originated in Charles Mingus' workshop.

When Rodriguez-Lopez hears the album now, he says it takes him back to the 37 straight days he spent in the studio, and to the unwelcome spirits that were flying around while his band was trying to work. That's audible — The Bedlam in Goliath is thrilling and a little bit terrifying at the same time. It's like some kind of sinister amusement-park ride. You get in and discover that Satan is at the controls, and he's smiling, and he has no intention of slowing down until everyone's screaming at the top of their lungs.