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The Mars Volta at the Tabernacle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Mars Volta deals in extremes. The band’s sound sometimes swings from one extreme to the other, but more often it incorporates both extremes at once. Loud and soft, punk-rock and space-rock â€â€? listening to this band is like hearing Pink Floyd play metal, like hearing Rush collide with Radiohead.
The Mars Volta plays brutally hard music that’s also pretty, or maybe it’s the other way around. Lyrics are mostly in English, but sometimes in Spanish, which is how the Pixies used to do it, but the Pixies played abrupt pop in punk’s clothing and the Mars Volta dresses abrupt punk in the flowing robes of sprawling progressive rock.
The band’s 2005 record, “Frances The Mute,” is for the most part extremely good, one of the most ambitious I’ve heard all year. The band’s show Friday night at the Tabernacle was for the most part extremely bad, the most frustrating concert I’ve attended all year.
Over the course of more than two hours, the band somehow obscured almost everything that makes it great. On “Frances,” The Mars Volta synthesized such disparate sounds as squawky jazz and thrashing rock, using the piercing voice of singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala as a kind of laser-guided weapon, cutting through the chaos. In concert, the band sounded like a murky mess.
I’ve seen a lot of shows at the Tabernacle, and Friday night’s sound was the worst â€â€? it seemed to have the treble and bass maxed out, at the expense of midrange. Bixler-Zavala’s voice had little support. Multiple instruments (keyboards, percussion, flute, sax) were inaudible for long stretches of the show. A friend unfamiliar with the band joined me at the concert, and he left complaining that he couldn’t hear any detail, which is terrible, because the details are what make this band so amazing under the right circumstances.
We got a glimpse of the band’s greatness about halfway through the set during “L’Via “L’Viaquez,” the centerpiece of “Frances,” which is part angular rock song, part Afro-Cuban groove. The Mars Volta loves to lurch, and the effect can be unpleasantly jarring, but this song â€â€? live and on record â€â€? has improbably wonderful pacing that lures you in.
Most of Friday’s show did the opposite of lure. Songs seemed to go on forever, and the set hardly ever had a full stop â€â€? between tunes the band would keep the music going with little interludes. A charitable fan might say the musicians were constructing a sonic bridge between the song that just ended and the song that was to begin. A less charitable view would say they were just noodling â€â€? one interlude sounded like a cross between a whale song and a Van Halen riff.
If the songs themselves came off right, these inter-song meanderings could’ve been forgiven. But not on this night.
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