The Shallow Progression

Progressive Rock.

Progressive.

I've now listened to the new Mars Volta like 2 and a half several times. Each time it progresses. Each time there's something more to hear. And yet...

It's the same with every Mars Volta album. They bear, indeed insist upon, repeated listens. I've seen it said that their albums are so long, so involved, that in this day of quick fix tunes, internet buzz, high turnover, who could be bothered with it? And in a way isn't that why they're refreshing? They demand where others almost apologise for distracting our attention. Cedric Bixlar-Zavala, in an interview has this interesting comparison:

Some of our conversations in life are fifteen minutes long, you know. I’d hate to think that the stereotypical American is someone who just says “Hi – bye” in conversation. That’s how Europeans see us. And I’d like to think that not all of us are like that. If I do meet someone and I ask them how it’s going, and they are having a shitty day and their dog has died, I do want to know about it. I want to know humanity. I don’t want fast-food culture in my interactions with people.

It's an interaction. It's kind of interesting that here's this band that people suggest don't really fit the internet age talking up interaction. Isn't that what the internet has meant to have brought us? More interaction with more people? Or has it only brought faster interaction? Faster because shorter? More interaction taking up the same amount of time so there's less possibility for substance in interaction?

So they demand. I like that. I've got so many albums recently that have washed straight over me. Admittedly they were pleasant enough while they passed but they left nothing. There was no desire on their part to stay with me, no desire on my part to have them stick around. Pleasant. It refreshes to have a listen that demands. Refreshes to actually have to say, "Right. I'm going to devote 75 minutes to this album. I'm not just going to listen to a couple of tracks while I'm browsing the internet, I'm going to listen. And then I may well listen again."

This is progressive.

They demand and demand more than ever on Bedlam in Goliath. Cedric's voice has never demanded more. He's turned up the shriek and sustains it over the whole album. And there seems to be a lack of space on the album. A lack of space to breathe, it hardly ever stops, hardly ever tones down, just keeps on coming. This is probably the major difference between Bedlam and the previous albums. Intensity.

And yet.

Here's Cedric on being termed Prog Rock:

It concerns me because I think the style of prog rock is, we don't want to carbon copy it. The fact that we're so active the way we are live makes us candidates for punks instead of prog rock really. But I like the term in terms of the dictionary definition of progressive music, moving forward and trying things that push boundaries, but we're not on stage singing about medieval goblins or stuff like that.

It's interesting that he compares their music to both punk and prog because isn't this the whole point? That it's only within the "spirit of the age" that punk and prog mean anything. The original punk surge was radical because of what it swept aside but once punk has become the mainstream, once it was discovered that this was easier, more saleable than prog, then prog became the outsider, was given the chance to become radical. He distances their music from a stereotype of prog while embracing the idea, embracing the intensity of prog under the name of punk.

This is progressive.

But progression? "Moving forward and trying things that push boundaries"? This is where my reservations on this album lie. My very first reaction to it was that it was The Mars Volta by numbers. Having listened to it more I've mellowed to it. I can see something in it. But I'm not exactly sure it's progression. It's more of a ...
essentialisation ... if that's even a word... It is The Mars Volta with everything inessential removed. So on first listen it sounded like Mars Volta by numbers, but digging deeper it turns out that they have distilled their essence and put it on record.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Not really. It's just that I really liked Amputechture. I know many didn't, but I thought it was a progression, taking the sound from the first two albums and adding a different feel while keeping the essence. Another quote from Cedric:

I think it’s one thing to say you’re adventurous and it’s another thing to actually do it. That’s why there’s all these bands that are recreating OK Computer. Radiohead doesn’t want to recreate OK Computer, so you have all these mediocre either soccer-mom versions of it or metal versions of it, so it can appeal to young people. Because young people didn’t gravitate toward or understand things like Amnesiac or Kid A, which I think are phenomenal – and one of the reasons I do is because they don’t sound like OK Computer. It sounds like music of the future. It’s the sound of a band shedding its skin every time there’s a new record to be made. I wish more bands would do that. Then we’d have less bands like Coldplay and Travis trying to rip off the most digestible parts of Radiohead – selling it back to people who are dumb enough to think it’s something new or interesting. A lot of people who’ve said they’d follow us with blind faith, they really don’t. They’re hoping we’d recreate our first two albums again, which is just boring. That’s suicide more than it is murder. I’m not going to give a fan the benefit of a suicide. I’m paying too much attention to them. We’ve never been a jukebox and we’ve never been the kind of DJ who takes requests.

Isn't the problem (one problem among many) with Travis/Coldplay that they lose the essence of what they're copying? They take it and turn it to nothing. And I can't leave the quote without suggesting he's wrong about the whole "young people didn’t gravitate toward or understand things like Amnesiac or Kid A", I don't think it's a problem with, specifically, young people. It's just a "problem" with "people".

Bedlam though. I think the mention of suicide in the above quote is interesting because Bedlam seems to be less of a progression and more of an affirmation of The Mars Volta. It's certainly not a return to the first two albums, but neither is it a progression. And it isn't a treading of water either. It fits none of these categories.

There's a comparison to be made here with the lyrical content of their albums. The amazing thing about The Mars Volta's lyrics has always been their ability to condense the major theme of the album into just about every single lyric on the album, without ever making the major theme of the album explicit in any lyric. So just as musically Bedlam condenses some of sort of essence of Mars Volta, so it condenses the essence of the album lyrically without ever spelling it out. In this sense it is an essence that is always absent, but an essence still. It circles round a core, without ever approaching it but constantly referring to it. If we transfer this thought to the music we can perhaps see what happens to the essence in the example above "bands like Coldplay and Travis trying to rip off the most digestible parts of Radiohead". They have attempted to name the essence, capture this essence that is empty and they end up with precisely nothing.

Of course it is here that we come across the much mentioned way that the album came about, Omar coming across a Ouija board:

Omar stumbled across this antique talking board. In American terms, it’s called a Ouija board, even that “Ouija” is not an American word. I think it’s either French or German. Omar just knew I would love something like that. Having the old habits that I do with drug use, it became my new drug. It became a private sort of drug that only Omar and I would play. And pretty much playing that thing was when we had all our drummer problems and everything kind of went to shit for our last album. We didn’t get to tour that much on it because of all the problems, all the bad luck from it. That’s when it started, and the more and more I played it, the more and more I wrote everything down that it was saying, and the more and more I was excited by it, because I was having such a dry spell for inspiration. And, of course, a lot of people can comment and say it probably just is me writing this stuff down. But it’s an exercise in opening up portals in the back of the head – not so immediately in front.

This most essential of Mars Volta albums comes about not because of some voice deep within, from some deep, essential soul, but externally, from the different voices emanating from this Ouija board. If they had actually set out to make the essential Mars Volta album they would have been in the same position as Colplay in relation to Radiohead, losing the essence in an attempt to capture the essence. The only way to reach this essence is to ignore it completely, or, more accurately, the essence is created from without, not from deep within.

And in this we find a rock equivalent of Burial's Untrue. Whereas Untrue uses samples, Bedlam uses voices from a Ouija board, to create something essentially progressive.