The Mars Volta

The weird part is not that this is a concept album about a Ouija board called the Soothsayer and a spirit named Goliath, it's that Bedlam was inspired by the Mars Volta's actual supernatural encounters and bad luck. Trying to break their believed curse via music, the band's fears translate into their most aggressive album yet. With brain-bursting rhythms, rickety feedback, rippling falsetto, churchly echoes and Middle Eastern inflections, they succeed in revealing both their acid-prog genius ("Goliath," "Soothsayer," "Agadez") and their multifaceted madness ("Conjugal Burns").

"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 t... More >