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MAD LIBERATION
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For the inaugural headlining tour behind their debut album, De-Loused in the Comatorium (Universal), the Mars Volta brought along as supporting acts the New Jersey rock band Rye Coalition and the poet Saul Williams. At a sold-out Axis last Friday, Williams punctuated his radical-themed, hip-hop-styled verse with an audience-participation Mad Lib exercise that revealed the Voltan fan base to be erudite, partisan, funky, and a little odd. He asked for a plural noun and got "Afros," for an animal and got "ocelot," for an adjective and received "provocative." Nonsense word? "Republican!" someone shouted. Person in the room? "Saul Fucking Williams!" a fan cried. "Is ‘Fucking’ in quotations?" he asked. "Hyphenated," she shot back, without missing a beat. (The Mad Lib turned out to be a recipe for — what else? — a concert review.) A while later, the Mars Volta’s creative strike force — the absurdly skinny duo of singer Cedric Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodriguez, both formerly of At the Drive-In — bounded on stage with their provocative Afros and a multi-ethnic three-piece rhythm section: bassist Juan Alderete, drummer Jon Theodore, and keyboardist Isaiah Owens. (Sparta’s Paul Hinojos filled in as off-stage sound manipulator for the late Jeremy Michael Ward, who died of a drug overdose in May.) It’s worth committing all those names to memory, because they belong to one of the most astounding live rock-and-roll bands now extant. The scope and breadth of the Mars Volta’s music invites gratuitous hyphenation: their long, winding, oscillating metallic sonatas sound like nothing else. To approximate their motivations, you’d have to skip back an entire generation, or maybe two: an Afro-Cuban Led Zeppelin? Santana essaying Bad Brains? Miles Davis: the Dischord sessions? Bixler’s acrobatic, crystalline, 78th-story falsetto — imagine if Geddy Lee could sing like Robert Plant — was matched by his explosive, gravity-defying presence: he shook and twirled and pleaded and collapsed and rose and spun the microphone stand away and back again with James Brown–like dexterity. (At one point, Theodore pounded a cymbal so hard the stand fell; Bixler, with his back to the kit, spun and caught it before it hit the ground.) The interplay between Theodore and Owens evoked vintage Latin-tinged rhythm and blues or ghostland ’60s soul; meanwhile, Rodriguez rained spiky post-punk chords and dissonant, dazed-and-confused note clusters filtered through space-rock effects pedals. They played numbers from De-Loused — a song cycle about an artist friend of Bixler’s who’d committed suicide — in approximately the order they appear on the album, but almost every song seemed to be reinvented on the spot, or to generate new directions. Rodriguez would begin with a long solo, Bixler would chime in with a lyric or vocal fillip, and eventually they’d find their way in and out of the song. They started off with "Inertiac ESP," the most confounding, and the most-played, song on alternative-rock WFNX last week. "Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)" veered off into a 10-minute-plus excursion, always returning to the enigmatic, waltz-like refrain: "Exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed!" It was easy to lose track of what song was being played: "Drunkship of Lanterns" appeared to mutate into a completely different tune before returning over the course of eight minutes or so. It was a mesmerizing, jaw-dropping, theatrical performance: impulsive, jazz-like improvisation that coalesced into the patterns of collective tension and release that herald great soul music. Or for that matter great punk rock. Mars Fucking Volta. You think that’s hyphenated?
BY CARLY CARIOLI
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