In the Studio: The Mars Volta Triumph Over Evil Spirits, Write Shorter Songs for "The Bedlam in Goliath"

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Evil spirits tried to sabotage Mars Volta's new record, The Bedlam in Goliath, which is due January 29th. No shit: Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez bought singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala a Ouija board in Jerusalem, and the duo is convinced that phantoms conspired to derail the band's fourth album. "It felt like savagery," says Rodriguez-Lopez, who buried the board in an effort to undo the curse. They endured power outages, studio floods, the engineer's nervous breakdown and tracks disappearing while recording in L.A. The duo used the spirits' messages in the lyrics and fed off their energy. "It didn't affect the music so much as the expression of the music," he says. "The concept was to make a more aggressive, vital record."

"Aberinkula," "Wax Simulacra" and "Tourniquet Man" have the staccato guitar and drum blasts of primal punk, and all come in under three minutes. "I rediscovered Bad Brains and the Germs," Rodriguez-Lopez says. No worries: There are still plenty of proggy interludes, and most songs are still five or six minutes. "That's a lot shorter for us," says Rodriguez-Lopez. "They don't have as much as what other people call 'meandering' and what I call 'mood-building.'"

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Song Stories

“Karma Chameleon”

Culture Club | 1983

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."

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