De-Loused in the Comatorium
Having received this album over the course of the Christmas season, I felt it only fitting to update the blog by writing a review of it.
Coming from pretty much nowhere in 2003, The Mars Volta came out with their first album, De-Loused in the Comatorium. The members of the band were at least partly formed from the ashes of Hardcore band At the Drive in, and this background influences the album with it’s strange lyrics, wall-of-sound guitar work, and pounding drumming.
De-Loused is a concept album, telling the story of the mental battles of a comatose man following a failed suicide attempt, and the strange places he visits in his own twisted imagination. The story itself was inspired by a similar suicide attempt by one of singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s friends. Coincidentally, the band’s sound manipulation artist died of a heroin overdose one month before the album’s release.
The lyrics are possibly the only questionable part of this drug-addled mixture. They make very little sense even at the best time, and often drift in and out of the spanish mother tongue of the singer. This probably reflects the hallucinogenic premise, and although an acquired taste, appeal to me at least. The music is not something that you listen too lightly, it’s intensity and length demands you give it your full attention for the whole 61 minute playtime.
Although many will find the music contained within obtuse, impenetrable and ever so slightly nonsensical, i nevertheless recommend De-Loused to anyone willing to throw off the shackles of genre conventions and try something new for once.
8/10
Ghostly Noises?
There’s a sound that seems to play about a third into the song “Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt” by the Mars Volta that sounds exactly like a phone vibrating on a desk, and it makes me frantically search the desk every time it goes off. Am I imagining things?
