Disappointed in the Auditorium

The Friday before last I went to watch The Mars Volta perform at the Aragon Theater, on the north side of Chicago. The theater is a massive building, but even more bizarre. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. The lobby is a large, marble, open area with overly ornate architecture and designs on the floor and ceiling. When you ascend the wide staircase to the stage area, what you find is Medieval Times converted into a music venue. Fake parapets and other “medieval” fortifications decorate the walls, and an enormously high ceiling displays fourth grade level drawings of stars and galaxies.

After waiting in the rain with a mostly high school age crowd (many of whom had been there since 2 pm), I staked out my place inside this unique venue. There I was, in soaking wet clothes, crunched up close to the front of the stage, nut to butt with screaming, laughing, and smoking 16 year olds. My spirits weren’t too low, however, because The Mars Volta, whose live show I had heard so much about, were to come on in only thirty minutes. However, the Mars Volta did not grace us with their presence at the allotted hour. Even the stalwart fans who surrounded me (indeed, I heard the Mars Volta likened to God, and the concert to the second coming more than twice during our wait) began to get a little anxious.

Finally, after screaming themselves hoarse and more than an hour after the concert was scheduled to begin, the indistinguishable radio music which had been blaring on the monitors stopped short and the lights went out. When the Mexican National Anthem began to blast from the speakers and the lights went red, and the silhouetted figures of the Mars Volta emerged, fists raised, from backstage, I thought the kids around me might collapse into seizure.

The anthem ended, and Blake Fleming (who is replacing Jon Theodore for the tour) started kicking the bass drum rapidly, and a wall of sound erupted. Cedric Bixler-Zavala (lyricist/singer) started dancing frantically and the rest of the tall and lanky band members (who include: Pablo Hinojos-Gonzalez, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Juan Alderete De la Peña, Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez, and Adrian Terrazas Gonzalez), dressed in skinny jeans and tiny blazers, started pounding out noise on their respective instruments.

For the next two hours the band played through most of their new material, (including songs from Frances the Mute, and their most recent, Amputechture) with extended noisy jams, little dynamic changes, filling in the gaps between songs with cacophonous dissonance, thus making each song barely distinguishable from the next. The only indication that the band had changed songs was that Cedric, in his raspy alto, would start screaming out words in a different key.

With each song, the band attempted the same aesthetic: a noisy crescendo ending in Omar (guitarist/writer) playing very quickly on the guitar, Cedric belting notes in a pitch that I didn’t realize men could reach, and the crowd screaming. Displaying a wide variety of instruments, as the Mars Volta did, doesn’t necessitate musical prowess, especially when these instruments are inaudible over the blaring guitar. Apparently, others disagree. There were moments when the drummer would finally change his rhythm and a catchy African influenced jam would come to a climax. However, these genuine moments of musical excellence were few and far between. And more frustratingly, when they did occur, they were dwarfed and drowned by the rest of the mono-dynamic set.

Pretensions of eclecticism, musicianship, and ingenuity abounded in this live performance, but their execution left me wanting. In fact, I’d describe the experience as mostly frustrating. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, the brains behind the project, is quite talented, and there is assuredly potential for greatness. But unfortunately, they drown this potential in death metal beats and uninteresting noise. The Mars Volta left me slightly deaf, over stimulated, and wishing that I had seen Sonic Youth.

If you've never heard the Mars Volta before, I'd recommend their first album Deloused in the Comatorium, epsecially the song "Intertiatic E.S.P."



Tony