Twisted Power Pop

The Mars Volta turns up the style on The Bedlam in Goliath 

By Alan Sculley

The Mars Volta will perform at the Fillmore at Jackie Gleason Theatre at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 2.

“You want to kind of keep everyone guessing the whole time, otherwise it just becomes a really stagnant relationship and everything becomes predictable.”

Those are the words of singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala. If ever a band has lived up to that notion, it’s Bixler-Zavala’s group, The Mars Volta.

And with its newly released fourth CD, The Bedlam in Goliath, Bixler-Zavala thinks the group has once again made music that will surprise and challenge listeners.

What’s surprising, though, is how The Mars Volta chose to shake up its sound. The band has been lauded for creating epic, sonically and technically adventurous songs that mixed progressive rock and punk.

On Bedlam in Goliath, the group — at least to a point — has turned that stylistic image on its side by crafting several shorter songs with actual pop hooks.

“We wanted to try new things like that,” Bixler-Zavala said. “For me, at home and in the car, I listen to Badfinger and I listen to Slade. I have a really bad itch for, like, power pop and a lot of ’70s power pop. I think sometimes it came out [on the CD] by being more structured and sounding less like it was a band that relied more on improv, because we’ve done that for so long.”

Of course, in the hands of The Mars Volta, power pop gets a different twist. There are some big pop hooks and melodic vocals in such songs as “Aberinkula,” “Goliath” and “Wax Simulacra.” But even those songs come with plenty of complex instrumental parts and unique sonic effects. And the band’s sound grows closer to its epic, unpredictable self on “Metatron,” “Cavalettas” and “Agadez.”

“There are moments where I’ve heard people say it sounds like the first album,” Bixler-Zavala said, referring to the group’s 2003 debut, De-loused in the Comatorium. “But that’s just because we made a point to actually play shorter songs because we start attracting these people who think we’re only a certain kind of band.”

Obviously, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (the band’s guitarist/producer/songwriter), Bixler-Zavala and their bandmates (guitarist Paul Hinjos, keyboardist Isaiah “Ikey” Owens, bassist Juan Alderete de la Peña, horn player Adrian Terrazas-Gonazalez, percussionist Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez and new drummer Thomas Pridgen) enjoy experimenting. It’s worth noting that At the Drive-In — the acclaimed pre-The Mars Volta band that featured Rodriguez-Lopez, Bixler-Lopez and Hinjos — was just as unconventional.

But in making The Bedlam in Goliath, the idea of shaking things up creatively took on a whole new — and unsettling — double meaning, thanks to the acquisition of a Ouija-style “talking board” called the Soothsayer.

Bixler-Zavala said the Soothsayer began to reveal names, phrases and eventually a story that he expanded to include commentary on a dark side of organized religion.

“It’s a story of the basic honor killings that happen very commonly in Islamic cultures, extremist Islamic cultures,” Bixler-Zavala said, referring to the practice of fathers killing daughters who are considered to have dishonored their families by having premarital or extramarital relations.

The names, phrases and story emerging from the board were one thing. But then came bigger signs that something truly strange was happening on The Bedlam in Goliath project. There was the sudden nervous breakdown of a sound engineer who freaked out and ran off with the tapes for the CD; a series of equipment malfunctions that claimed other tracks that had been recorded; and eventually a flood of Rodriguez-Lopez’s studio.

“A lot of it [the music] had to be re-created,” Bixler-Zavala said. “There was some stuff that was ready to go that we had to start over on. I had to convince Omar not to start the whole project over, which would have put us back another year or two. I had to convince him that the power and the spirit of this board are like a lot of the people who work with the band, and a lot of people who work with the band are constantly telling us, ‘No, you can’t do that.’

“That’s essentially what the [band’s] whole story is really — doing things the hard way and having the last laugh and having come out of it with our wits about us and still physically intact.”

That’s been true of The Bedlam in Goliath as well. Lopez eventually buried the Soothsayer in an unknown location, and Bixler-Zavala said the strange happenings have since ceased.

That’s good, considering The Mars Volta is now returning to the road. But Bixler-Zavala said the group probably won’t be as self-indulgent as on early tours, when entire sets sometimes consisted of as few as two songs.

“It was kind of a matter of us just being bored with the first record,” Bixler-Zavala said. “After we had done the first album, we realized how much of it we didn’t like because of how simplified the producer [Rick Rubin] made it. There were only a couple of songs we wanted to show everyone that represented us really, or represented the heart of what we were trying to do. That just kind of went hand in hand with everything.”

Mars Volta will perform at 8 p.m. Wednesday, April 2, at the Fillmore at Jackie Gleason Theatre, 1700 Washington Ave., Miami Beach. Tickets are $36.50 and can be purchased at www.ticketmaster.com.