The Mars Volta - 'Noctourniquet'
This summer, a new generation of fans will discover the visceral scissor-jab to the senses of a reformed At The Drive-In at a brief series of shows, 11 years after their original implosion. When they call it quits (again), many of those fans will...
Album review: The Mars Volta - 'Octahedron'
“Mellow” and “acoustic”: terms not normally associated with – and not really welcome anywhere near – The Mars Volta , but terms applied by the band themselves to their latest effort. Before you run off in a rage proclaiming their...
The Mars Volta are the sort of band who could take an otherwise-innocuous tourbus anecdote about misplacing their Moroccan nasal flautist in a Little Chef toilet on an M8 lay-by and turn it into a 75-minute musical odyessy of metaphysical...
The Mars Volta: The Bedlam In Goliath
Could’ve happened to anyone, really. You buy a Ouija board in a curiosity shop in Jerusalem to mess around with on the tourbus. You start talking to it. It talks back. It soon transpires that said Ouija board contains the spirit of a malevolent...
Have The Mars Volta gone all comprehensible? Great shakes are being made of the fact that after one imaginary sci-fi adventure (‘De-Loused In The Comatorium’) and one musical reimagining of a diary that their friend found in the back of a taxi...
The Mars Volta : Birmingham Academy
During the last two years, only a live televised reincarnation of John Bonham could have done more to raise the profile of prog-rock than The Mars Volta . Latest album ‘Frances The Mute’ has again shown that Cedric Bixler Zavala...
The Mars Volta : Frances The Mute
There’s a lot of nonsense gets spouted about prog rock at the moment, not least because nobody seems sure what it actually is. Usually, they mean something else entirely, namely ‘that which is neither garage nor art rock but isn’t metal...
Mars Volta : Glasgow Barrowland : Wednesday...
Prog Rock. The final frontier. The tie-dyed last taboo. The sound of the joke that’s been taken too far. Yes, prog has spent nigh-on thirty years languishing in (rightful) ridicule, sneered at by the snotty punkers of ’77 and incomprehensible...
Given their brilliant hairstyles, it's a pity that At The Drive In had to eventually have something so sensible as a parting. One slightly annoying split down the middle later we find two separate factions: on the one hand, Sparta (sensible...
