On the Mars Volta

Last night, I engaged my roommate in a spirited debate about the merits of The Mars Volta. It was in this argument that I managed to properly articulate my feelings on them for the first time. I thought that I would articulate them here. I have listened to the Mars Volta. I listened to "De-Loused in the Comatorium" and "Frances the Mute", frantically in search of the innovative genius that I heard so many sources rave about.

I didn't hear genius. I heard a band that was terrified by the fact that they had nothing to say. A band that tried to mask its lack of a lyrical message in an impenetrable fog of PSAT words clumsily cobbled together in hopes that listeners will infer meaning and message from it. Don't believe me? I offer this selection from "Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)" as evidence.

"Transient jet lag ecto mimed bison / this is the haunt of roulette dares / ruse of metacarpi / caveat emptor...to all that enter here / open wrists talk back again / in the wounded of its skin / they'll pinprick the witness / in ritual contrition / the AM trinity fell upon asphyxia-derailed / in the rattles of... / made its way through the tracks / of a snail slouching whisper / a half mass commute through umbilical blisters."

I don't think there's any need to go further. These lyrics are positively nonsensical; they bear no meaning whatsoever, neither at face value, nor after an English-Major style dissection. They are the work of a band that has nothing to say, but wants to maintain the appearance of profundity. This is far removed from the heartbreaking poignance of Jeff Tweedy's drug-addled chronicle of his search for stability as heard on "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot". On that album, the lyrics were as confused as Tweedy, and because he could not find meaning in the conventional, he groped desperately for a means of expression that would capture his struggle - and it was moving. Moreover, he had a body of work before YHF that proved that he could write straightforward pop lyrics (see "Being There"...both discs), for which YHF's lyrical complexity is all the more moving.

Well, plenty of bands write bad lyrics. Why indict the Mars Volta? I indict them because they take precisely the same approach to their music as to their lyrics. They have no substantive musical ideas, so they soak their songs in reverb, put disgusting effects on (the laughably untalented) Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's guitars, and willfully disorient their listeners in a maelstrom of hemiola and syncopation that lacks any musical direction or sense of purpose. I credit their very gifted rhythm section, but this is only two members of a now eight-piece outfit. Far from redemptive.

The Mars Volta seem to believe that making their music exhausting and difficult to listen to confers meaning upon it. The are cursed; they are (wrongly) assured of their genius, but also frightened by their own incapability to express it, so they revert to making their music so pointlessly complex that they can brand those who criticise them as philistines. My response to that strategy is this: self-conscious inaccessibility is really than self-indulgent garbage, and the deadly combination of their misguided arrogance, their incompetence as songwriters, along with the fact that they speak without having anything to say, has come through on their every release.


-PTC