#comatorium

I bought this record on CD about thirteen years ago during a very dismal freshman year of college at a generic-looking CD store in Greenwich Village. I was looking for a job and didn’t know how to broach that topic with the person behind the counter who looked decidedly managerial, so I picked up something I was going to buy anyway with money I was in no position to be spending just so I could go up to them and say “are you hiring”. They said they actually might be and for me to return the subsequent weekend for an interview or a training or something. I never went back.

For much of the rest of my college career this album remained very important for me. I really bought into it being this wild, heady, progressive rock album for enlightened listeners. (Which I guess I also considered myself to be.)

Though when I listened to it the other day I was fully cognizant of having been moved only by the parts of the music that gripped me in a broader, non-conceptual-rock-oriented way, both then and now. Like, I like hearing Omar Rodriguez-Lopez really bash on his guitar, more or less the same way he did in At the Drive-In. He really sounds like he’s working something out and it remains the strongest aspect of this album, I think. I definitely enjoy some of Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s falsetto. There’s plenty of interesting sounding effects throughout this record. That’s undeniable. 

But who the hell would write home about this great record they heard based solely on it’s amazing echoes and reverse tape effects? They were clearly thrown in as some stab at sounding proggy, but honestly who cares? These songs would sound fine without them. Who even would praise the stylistic shifts that litter many of the songs on the record? That’s a “smart guy band” thing to do, right? Is that even much of a feat? I think maybe I thought that that 5-or-so-minute-long passage of near silence in “Cicatriz ESP” was genius at the time I first heard it, because I had little else to refer to before it, and I suspected it really challenged many listeners less intelligent that I, an Informed Music Listener ©. Really, though, it would’ve been a perfectly decent seven-or-eight-minute long song without that.

The “storyline” and intentional obfuscation of lyrics is simply insulting, as is the case whenever a writer of any form makes their words less understandable. (In any language, mind you; I know enough Spanish to know that he’s simply inventing words here and there.) It’s hardly even worth commentary. Bixler-Zavala’s a great singer for sure, and I can’t comment on much else he’s released with the Mars Volta since this, but if he’s continuing this charade then he can fuck right off.

son et lumiere