[Dixielandjazz] The Music Scene Today

[Steve barbone]

LONG, NOT OKOM, BUT . . . If you want to learn about today's music scene,
this review is a MUST READ. I'm going to keep it in my files just to be able
to quote (steal) some of the more colorful phrases from it.

LIKE: "More often, the music combines the kitchen-sink inclusiveness of
psychedelia with the swerves and jolts of the hip-hop era, to approach the
ravenous eclecticism of Latin alternative rock." WHOA, HEAVY and we trash
today's kids as not appreciating music? Sounds like their appreciation for
it must be much more intellectual than ours, just to understand what the
foregoing description means.  :-) VBG

Cheers,
Steve (tongue firmly in cheek) Barbone

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February 27, 2005 NY Times, By JON PARELES

Strike Up the Band in 13/4 Time: Progressive Rock Returns
 
It's no wonder progressive rock was nearly laughed out of business when punk
rock came along. With its album-length suites and cosmic philosophizing, its
quasi-classical pomp and showy instrumental interludes, prog rock was
long-winded, pretentious, cerebral, fastidiously technical and decidedly
self-indulgent - all of which suddenly became no-nos as punk attacked all
the ways rock had grown hifalutin and out of touch in the 1970's. Prog had
been nerdy all along, the province of musicians and fans who could get all
excited about a meter change or a dissonant guitar line. And punk destroyed
any hopes that prog might have harbored of gaining cachet to match its
elevated ambitions.

But prog is now resurfacing, not only among the diehards who never let go of
it - bands like Rush and Dream Theater, labels like Cuneiform Records - but
also for younger musicians and fans. Radiohead's most recent albums brought
the grandeur of progressive rock back into the Top 10, while the college
circuit supports bands as diversely proggy as Coheed and Cambria, which
sounds like outtakes from old Rush albums, and the stately, largely
instrumental bands Mogwai and Sigur Ros. This week the Mars Volta, a band
from El Paso that is prog-rock despite its members' protestations, releases
its second more-or-less concept album, "Frances the Mute" (Gold Standard
Laboratories/Strummer/Universal).

Until recently, neither fans nor mockers admitted that progressive rock
could also provide some of the same thrills - speed, whipsaw changes, sheer
pummeling impact - as punk. That's why many of prog's musical twists
migrated elsewhere in the 1980's and 1990's: the odd meters to hardcore and
thrash metal, the dissonance to primitivist art rock, the convoluted song
structures to indie rock and its proud subset of math rock.

Prog may have been hopelessly uncool, but it was nothing if not alternative.
Despite its brainy reputation, at its core it was a rebellion against
ordinary pop. By any objective reckoning, it was also deeply demented. Who,
after all, would labor over a suite in 13/4 time pondering the meaning of
free will when the way to gigs and hits was with catchy love songs?

Dementia reigns, to good effect, in the Mars Volta. The band was formed in
2001 by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler Zavala, two former members of
At the Drive-In, a college-circuit emo band that fissioned on the verge of
wider recognition. (Three other members formed Sparta.) Its first
full-length album, "De-Loused in the Comatorium" in 2003, was conceived as
the visionary deathbed fantasies of a comatose man. "Frances the Mute" grew
out of a diary, found by a band member, of an adopted man seeking his
biological parents, and its five extended, multipart songs are named after
characters from the diary.

That's according to the band's Web site. True to prog-rock precedent, the
lyrics are both copious and hermetic. The Mars Volta's singer and lyricist,
Mr. Bixler Zavala, spews streams of consciousness in English and Spanish.
They are not for the squeamish: "Behind the snail secretion leaves a dry
heave that absorbs a limbless procreation." It would take more than a
decoder ring to decipher a storyline on "Frances the Mute," though there are
glimmers: "I won't forget who I'm looking for/Oh mother help me," the singer
moans in "L'Via L'Viaquez."

Ancestry matters in the music on "Frances the Mute" - both the band's
musical precursors and the band members' mixture of Anglo and Hispanic
roots. But as with the adopted man in the songs, inheritance means less than
its unkempt present-day transformations. The 1970's legacy defines the
opening moments of the album, with 12-string guitar and an echoey high voice
singing dreamily about "the ocean floor," proving that the Mars Volta has
been listening to Led Zeppelin and Yes. Throughout the album, Mr. Bixler
Zavala's high tenor veers between Robert Plant's blue wails and Jon
Anderson's eunuch harmonies, and the bottom-scraping crunch of Juan Alderete
de la Peña's bass lines also echoes Yes. But unlike some latter-day
prog-rock the Mars Volta won't be mistaken for anything from the 20th
century.

The closest it comes is in the album's low point (and single), "The Widow,"
which may be trying to placate radio programmers by offering three mintes of
chest-heaving Led Zeppelin homage. But on the album, the band finishes the
track with a tangent: an additional two minutes of woozy, abstract
keyboards. 

The Mars Volta embraces musicianly complexities, showing off virtuosity by
revving the songs up to frenetic tempos. But it rejects the compulsive
neatness that classically trained musicians brought to prog-rock in the
1970's.

A big part of the difference is that punk and hip-hop have trained rock to
look for the vulgar before the cosmic. The Mars Volta's songs are expansive,
but they're not ethereal. Technical feats like the ones the Mars Volta pulls
off in every song can make music seem like a purer, cleaner realm, an escape
from imperfect reality. But not in these songs. As the band's producer, Mr.
Rodriguez-Lopez keeps the songs raggedly and aggressively concrete. He uses
guitar distortion, horn sections, sound effects and what sounds like the
manipulation of old-fashioned recording tape to match the music to the
near-toxic atmosphere of the lyrics.

Clashes, mutations and sudden leaps fill the songs, which can linger for
long minutes over an (odd-meter) vamp and one of Mr. Omar-Rodriguez's
jabbing guitar solos or switch instantly between disparate styles. "L'Via
L'Viaquez" moves between two characters, two languages, two voices (a
clarion, paranoid wail in Spanish and a furtive whisper in English), and two
musical idioms: bruising, accelerating funk behind the Spanish, which warns
of death threats and vengeance, and a slow, deliberate Latin vamp behind the
English, urging, "Don't be afraid." To scramble expectations further, the
Latin stretches feature Larry Harlow, a pianist who was an essential member
of the 1970's salsa supergroup the Fania All-Stars.

That kind of willfulness fills the album. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't
Holy Anymore" starts with a full minute of chirping birds (or crickets)
before gradually drifting into a mournful waltz with hints of both early
King Crimson and mariachi horns.

And lest anyone doubt the band's affinity for the old-fashioned epic, the
longest song on "Frances the Mute" is also the album's tour de force. For
most of its 32 minutes, "Cassandra Geminni" hurtles ahead on a tightly
wound, breakneck guitar riff; its first section is called "Tarantism," named
for the uncontrollable urge to dance supposedly caused by a tarantula's
bite. Mr. Bixler Zavala sings about birth, darkness and destruction; guitars
and bass work in contrapuntal patterns, strings and horns pile into the mix,
the song dissolves into free jazz and reappears. It's wildly, glorious
excessive, indulging the prog-rock impulses that are simply too ecstatic for
rock to leave behind.