It’s important to note that, earlier this year, the band released Landscape Tantrums: Unfinished Original Recordings of De-Loused in the Comatorium.
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The album is an immersive experience the first of many Volta releases that require its listeners to venture into their prog rock abyss with full focus, even if you happen to get lost along the way. If there’s any song that encapsulates the brilliance of De-Loused, it’s “Televators.” But to get there - and to get the album at all - you’ve got to listen to De-Loused in its entirety. “Televators” is a standout from the rest it’s a ballad that gradually grows in intensity, driven by Rodríguez-López’s acoustic guitar and Bixler-Zavala’s vocals. There’s a somberness present throughout the album, most notably on “Televators,” its second-to-last track. “Julio is just an example of a starving artist - someone who was always struggling, and when you’re struggling, your art shows, and he was a living, walking embodiment of what art is or what it should be.”ĭe-Loused feels - and sounds - like an epic tragedy. “He was our mentor, he taught us everything that created what we are today, basically,” Bixler-Zavala said of Venegas in a 2004 interview with Rockcircustv. A musician, painter and writer, Venegas died on February 15, 1996, in El Paso, Texas, when he jumped from an overpass and fell onto Interstate 10 during afternoon rush hour traffic. The songs are structured in a straightforward manner, even if the group takes an unexpected detour in the form of lengthy jam sessions, as is the case with the aforementioned “Cicatriz ESP” (which includes dueling guitar solos from Rodríguez-López and John Frusciante) and album-ender “Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt.” All of this is meant to help bring the narrative of De-Loused alive, which, underneath Bixler-Zavala’s enigmatic lyrics, is actually a tribute to Julio Venegas. The experimentation here is rather tame the cinematic tangents - the building silence that starts “Son et Lumière” or the cavernous water-drop echoes of the second half of “Cicatriz ESP” - aren’t overly indulgent, and truly make De-Loused feel like a concept album. De-Loused is pretty cohesive and digestible when compared to its successors Rick Rubin’s role as producer reportedly contributed to this cohesion. It’s an album that’s more in line with Antemasque (Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala’s short-lived side band) than the Volta, and it offers a glimpse of what the latter could’ve been if it leaned more into the sensibilities of their beloved At the Drive-In with more of a dash - rather than the whole bottle - of their prog rock experimentation.īut also, De-Loused is the album that started it all. That Rodríguez-López has described Noctourniquet as “future punk” is accurate. The latter has the unconventionality that’s been integral to the band since its inception, but it’s much more straightforward and less extravagant. The former is the better of the two, just because it feels like a Volta album: conceptual, indulgent, epic - a true prog rock classic.
‘De-Loused in the Comatorium’ or ‘Noctourniquet’Īccessible isn’t a word commonly used with The Mars Volta, but the two albums I’d recommend are either their first album, De-Loused in the Comatorium, or their last album, Noctourniquet.
Whether you’re looking for the most accessible album or maybe just a sampler EP to dip your toes into, hopefully this guide will help those curious about the Volta become either fans or, at the very least, understand why that friend of yours loves them so much. And rather than give you the response I used to give people that I thought made me sound so cool (“You just don’t get the Volta”), all I’m gonna say is this: Try and give one of these albums a chance based on how they’re categorized. If it’s not the off-kilter instrumentation, it’s Bixler-Zavala’s voice. Now, I know how tough this can be, especially for the indoctrinated. With that, they’ve also released a handful of singles that showcase their variety, too: somber waltzes and Latin funk-rock grooves - one that even earned the band their first (and only) Grammy.īut to really experience the Volta, it’s best to take in their project as they intended: in full.
Although the group has remained rooted in prog rock throughout those six albums, they’ve experimented with their sound in varying ways - from making it as maximalist as possible to releasing an album they refer to as an acoustic album (even though it’s technically not). With six studio albums to their name, I’m a firm believer that the Volta has something for everybody, even if they don’t necessarily think this band does.
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