Exhausted and Exasperated

While this may be a little dated, as The Mars Volta’s Bedlam in Goliath was released last year, I still feel it worth my rant. Street Press such as The Drum Media and The Brag raved about the album, but magazines such as Rolling Stone concluded that The Mars Volta are pretentious, Bedlam was only worth one and a half stars, and is ‘exhausting’ and ‘exasperating’ to listen to. I want to encourage everyone to expand your horizons and open your minds!
The Mars Volta’s ‘back’ story has often been ridiculed, their inspiration of the ouija board unleashing the spirit Goliath, insinuating that they are lying. As Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez themselves have said, they come from a completely different culture and often people in the Western world who inhabit a conservative and fairly intolerant value system dismiss their beliefs as crazy. However, when the Ouija story is relayed to people from Latin America, the response is an authentic acceptance of the presence of supernatural forces, and disbelief that anyone would dare tamper with a Ouija board. Even if they are having us on, isn’t it intriguing that they have a story behind their album?
I have often heard complaints of their song names, being too prog-rock for their own good, but what is the harm in using extravagant song names? An active listener would drag out a thesaurus and piece together the significance of the titles, and perhaps, have new meaning created for them. But who needs hidden meaning when we have all these ‘inventive’ bands just bombarding us with the same old clichés?
What troubles me is that magazines prominent in popular culture such as Rolling Stone, dismiss The Mars Volta as ‘pretentious’ but feel that a four page spread is necessary on the ever transparent, money making machine and, dare I say pretentious, band Fall Out Boy. To me, The Mars Volta is anything but ‘exhausting’ and ‘exasperating’ – they are daring, significant, creative and progressive. This strikes very true when attending their concert last year; they played for nearly 3 hours with a set list of about 8 songs. They deserve credit for their inventive and creative ‘jamming’ with their songs, and I have never seen energy levels so high for such a long concert.
At the risk of me now sounding pretentious, I urge people to invest their time in looking at bands that are creative and diverse, who may not fit into the reductive and repetitive expectations of the Top 40, or even the ‘Indie’ scene for that matter.
So keen for the upcoming album!