When veterans of the Mars Volta's three-hour live shows get together to compare psychological scars, they often speak of moments of dream-like isolation amid the aural carnage. People all around you will be rocking out to Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's fearsome Tex/Mex prog-fusion ensemble in the classic manner laid down by Beavis and Butthead then there will be a short pause, and someone will say 'shall we go?' And they'll all be off home. The lightweights.
The Mars Volta's last (live) album posited a grim future in which the only justification for listening to one of their records all the way through would be that hoary old mountaineers' excuse - 'because it was there'. But this early-Roxy-Music-meets-late Led-Zep-style third studio album finds the band stepping back from total impenetrability with a pithy, eight-song, 76-minute set, guaranteed to restore the faith of those whose confidence in this grand enterprise was waning.
The opening number, 'Vicarious Atonement', not only has a title which does not appear to be in a made-up language, it also clocks in at a mere seven minutes. Have these guys gone pop or what? OK, so the next track, 'Tetragrammaton', won't give you much change out of 17 minutes. But the lovely 'Asilos Magdalena' could be Victor Jara jamming with Devendra Banhart. And my personal highlight comes towards two-thirds of the way through 'Meccamputechture', when a scourging blast of free-jazz saxophone heralds the cheery mantra 'it lacks a human pulse'.
Download: 'Asilos Magdalena'; 'Meccamputechture'; 'Day of the Bahomets'
Tracks that are almost terse and not in a made-up language? Fantastic, smiles Ben Thompson: the prog-punk pair have matured
