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After the wall of noise and mayhem that was their last album, The Bedlam in Goliath, The Mars Volta (and their fans) needed a break. While providing this much needed relief, their fifth, self-proclaimed “acoustic album”, Octahedron, is nonetheless revelatory, varied, and exciting.
Recent single, ‘Since We’ve Been Wrong’ gently introduces the album with a minute or so of fluttering near-silence that’ll have you turning the volume to maximum. Casting aside their reputation for jolting musical changes in favour of a more traditional format, Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s falsetto vocals and Omar Rodríguez-López’s acoustic guitar start tenderly and build up slowly (using the lengthy 7 minute-plus running time) to a crashing climax before retreating into near-silence once again. The elegant combination of gentle acoustics, delicate vocals and minimalist electronics is picked up throughout the album and used to great effect in the beautifully haunting ‘With Twilight as My Guide’ and ‘Copernicus’, a song so soporific (in a good way) it’d send a lifelong insomniac into a coma (literally).
Don’t be lulled into thinking The Mars Volta has gone soft though. They repeatedly demonstrate their hatred for ear-drums. Those who turned their volume up for the first song (an intentional sadistic prompt?) will flinch as we launch straight into the abused drums and wavering electric guitars of ‘Teflon’ – a fitting song title from a band which is becoming increasingly difficult to classify. Even louder echoes of The Bedlam in Goliath can be found in the textured aggression of ‘Cotopaxi’ and the rocking vocals of its neighbour, ‘Desperate Graves’, which is comparable to some of Manic Street Preachers' recent material. The band also indulges in a bit of good old improvised jazz-punk in the final seconds of ‘Halo of Nebutals’.
Octahedron really deserves its title, with all eight tracks revealing a different (but equally expert) side of The Mars Volta. Some songs are dramatically different to previous work, displaying a gentleness I thought them incapable of, whereas others show a refining of their familiar progressive-rock sound. Rather than being exhausting and arguably quite dull, the rarity of the moments where they do rock out make them refreshing and bracing – qualities, in fact, which characterise the album.
The Mars Volta: official website | MySpace | on Spotify
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