SpearHeadNews

Read more than 4400 articles & interviews, see phantastic pictures of Live shows & other snapshots

 
 

Articles

 
 

Taken from Rolling Stone (Apr 22, 2021)

The Mars Volta's 'La Realidad de los Suenos' Is a Time Machine, a Treasure Chest, a Key

Much like Mars Volta's music, each spin through the box set reveals new facets, colors, snippets of words, and imagery

by Brenna Ehrlich


Cedric Bixler Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-Lopez. CREDIT: Robin Laananen
Cedric Bixler Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-Lopez. CREDIT: Robin Laananen


Discovering the Mars Volta has always felt like finding the key to another dimension teeming with monsters and magical arcana; twisted fables and dangerous lore. It's fitting, then, that their new career-spanning boxset, La Realidad de los Suenos, resembles some kind of trippy, seemingly bottomless treasure chest - an aural history of the band replete with hidden tricks and treats. Lift a hidden lid and a duo of pins tumble out - shift the LPs and a pair of 3D glasses fall to the floor that brings the album art covering the box to shivering life.


As Mars Volta impresario Omar Rodríguez-Lopez said in a recent interview about the release: "It's a snapshot, the only proof that I have that that person, now unrecognizable to me, once existed and did these things, had these experiences. It's like finding a beautiful surprise package that becomes sentient and awakens us". For his part, singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala calls the box set a "time machine".


Including a staggering 18 LPs - the Texas prog-rock band's entire remastered discography on vinyl (via Chris von Rautenkranz) along with various long-lusted-after lacunae from the Mars Volta's history - the set is a visual feast, and just sorting through its various volumes will set any fan back a fair chunk of time: from an accompanying photo book to said pins and glasses.



The remastered discography is, needless to say, a lush listen, but it's the various previously unavailable or hard-to-find cuts that pull the box set together, unlocking new facets of the band's trajectory. This is Mars Volta as they saw themselves, unfiltered by their label, Universal - with whom they had a rather contentious relationship - or outside producers. It's evident in the smallest touches - for example, the cover of De-loused in the Comatorium boasts the Storm Thorgerson-designed "jellyfish man" instead of the "egg man", who is featured on the Universal version of the record. And it's evident in the music Rodríguez-Lopez excavated from his vault. As Bixler-Zavala said in that interview: "We came from a different world - cool shapes, cool colors, cool shit you could do with it - shit that's just not fuckin' 'normieville.'"


First up, we meet the band sans label, with 2002's self-released Tremulant EP - which isn't currently available on streaming. That EP portends the kind of noisy, fable-laden mysticism we've come to expect from Rodríguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala as opener "Cut That City" slowly builds from what sounds like dead air to an eerie soundscape - then explodes.


Before Rick Rubin brought the polish to the band's celebrated 2003 debut De-loused in the Comatorium, there's the lost album cuts that comprise Landscape Tantrums, a decidedly less sleek collection of previously unreleased songs that, nonetheless, capture the glorious seance-gone-wrong ethos that is the Mars Volta. Those tracks are seemingly timeless, untouched by early Aughts rock fads, reminding us that this is a band of music nerds who used to geek out over classic punk and psych.



The set also features two lost songs from the De-Loused era, the palpating "A Plague Upon Your Hissing Children" (previously only available as a bootleg), and an alternate, tighter version of "Eunuch Provocateur", off Trelumlant. There's also "Mr. Muggs", a terrifying instrumental bonus single off the band's 2008 album The Bedlam in Goliath that sounds like an off-kilter soundtrack to a Twenties horror film - fitting, considering that Bedlam was famously inspired by a devious Ouija board. "Mr. Muggs" was even initially released on a piece of vinyl shaped like a planchette.


Much like Mars Volta's music, each spin through the box set reveals new facets, colors, snippets of words, and imagery. For long-time fans, it's an immersion, a time machine, as Bixler-Zavala calls it. For the newly initiated... well, refer to sentence number one.


La Realidad de los Suenos drops Friday, April 23rd via Clouds Hill.






 
 

Articles

 
 

Check out my latest Playlist

Get external player here

 
 

Latest News
  Last Update: 2024-03-28 23:50

 
 

News Selector