The Mars Volta: The Bedlam in Goliath : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"I'm starting to feel a miscarriage coming on," Cedric Bixler-Zavala announces in a tremulous bark in "Goliath," well into the crowded cerebral-metal violence of the Mars Volta's fourth studio album. It is late warning. Torsos already fly as thick and fast as the wasp-army guitars and rock-slide drumming in the first track, "Aberinkula." Bixler-Zavala and guitarist-producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez work furiously to achieve prog-rock transgression: compressing dissected time signatures and stammering riffs into seizures that sound like three Mars Voltas going off at once, splashed with the non-sequitur gore of Bixler-Zavala's singing in tongues (inspired this time, the band swears, by lethal spirits conjured on a Ouija board Rodriguez-Lopez found in Jerusalem). Parts of Bedlam seem indistinguishable from the frenzy on 2005's Frances the Mute, and it gets precariously close to nonsense. At one point in "Metatron," Bixler-Zavala appears to be in a different key and headspace from the rest of the Volta. But there is a great leap in the songwriting — closer to classic hard-rock force and melodic drama — that, in "Goliath," "Cavaletta" and the Holy City atmospheres of "Soothsayer," is even more jolting than the weirdness. It doesn't help you get any sense from a lyric like "I am a deaf con of Angora goats." But as Bixler-Zavala crows in "Cavaletta," "If you came here/For semantics/It's only a matter of folding/Time and space/Before I become your epidemic."