BURKEPOST BLOG

Omar and Cedric released Octahedron in June, but I didn’t know until I made a rare trip to Amoeba the other day, getting a pittance for unwanted CDs.  If there was any fanfare for The Mars Volta’s fifth full-length album, I missed it.  So here’s a review with little interference.

Octahedron opens with a minute and 36 seconds of droning.  It makes me wonder if that’s why I haven’t heard of it.  Their soundscapes are known to dawdle.  But clean guitar starts slow and nice in a restrained repetition.  Cedric Bixler Zavala’s first line, “Do you remember how you wore that dress?” suggests we might be in for an album with coherent stories – maybe as unified as the first two, and less coded.  The next line reassures TMV fans that this one too will be dark and incomprehensible: “It slit my sight beneath the eyelids.”

Five minutes in, I’m making the funk face, because the drums have kicked into this ballad (Since We’ve Been Wrong) and now the bass is going places, leading, blooming out of early melodies. To me, composer Omar Rodriguez-López’s guitarwork has usually been the best part of The Mars Volta’s crescendos, so that sounds like growth.

Octahedron is a slower album, with exceptions.  The hard rock highlight is Track 6, Desperate Graves.  It has a mini-headbanging chorus, a rare guitar solo, and Cedric’s best use of his vocal range.  The dark imagery of cut wrists and cut wings don’t appeal to me (“When I breathe the heavens can’t hold me/And I can’t believe any more/The light brings/The highest execution/Show me the wings I must cut”), but it doesn’t prevent this from being a great song.  Melodies overpower meaning, in this case, and several times throughout the album.

The third track’s title, Halo of Nembutals, refers to drug for inducing sedation, hypnosis, coma, and death. “Hear my request to be disowned/Of this I ate/Communion shaped/Serpent rays in prism tail rainbows escape.”  Here, too, I’m singing along, enjoying the song, despite the numbing content. In the lapsed-Christian vocals of Luciforms, the protagonist doesn’t want heaven to exist, a tragedy of embracing a devil over angels.  Another of this albums many devils, in With Twilight as My Guide, lives in tunnels and has daughters in our protagonist’s heart.  So there’s lots of regret and lost faith, suffering and fear.  But at the end of the track, it’s beautiful and fragile, “Every body hang like dead leaves/Don’t you hurt these/Branches waiting.”

Teflon is politically-themed, bass-driven, math rock, with an almost-catchy refrain: “Let the wheels burn/Let the wheels burn/Stack the tires to the neck/With the body inside.”  Cedric invites you to consider cremation and killing hostages in the oval office.  Near the end of the song: “One driver in the motorcade is all it takes.”  Is he referring to Teflon Ron Reagan, or maybe a composite smooth president in a cruel world?  The sessions were recorded in August 2008.

I first tried dissecting the lyrics without reading interviews, and I was disappointed with the lack of unity or insight.  Then I read about Cedric’s inside jokes, sarcasm, and absurdity, and Omar’s justification that it’s better to celebrate and look for meaning in dark subconscious fragments than to be afraid of them.  That may be true, and contemplating impermanence is beneficial, and most of Cedric’s melodies may be moving, but the fetishization of darkness is eventually poisonous to consciousness.

Cotopaxi is supposed to be the hit, right?  The song is faster and louder, but it’s also more familiar, and Cedric is too shrill for too long.  Then again, Omar directed an awesome video for Cotopaxi, which makes me like it more.

Second to last, Copernicus is a boring lullaby. It does get more interesting nearly four minutes in, with programmed percussion and a variation in the vocals, then it’s back to a slow chorus that begs for its own end.  The last track, like the first, starts after about a minute-and-a-half drone.  Luciforms is at least a representative track to end with, given that once again, needlessly dark imagery fails to ruin otherwise great rock.

Instruments=9.1

Vocal melody=8.4

Words=4.6;  Angel/Devil Cheese=61%

Hard Rock=30%

Great songs= Desperate Graves, Since We’ve Been Wrong, With Twilight as My Guide.

Avoidable songs=Cotopaxi, Copernicus

Overall=8.08