“Life On Mars”, artikel i Edmonton Journal
Life on Mars
Prog-rock band tours heavily symbolic fourth album
Tom Murray, Freelance
Published: 2:03 am
THE MARS VOLTAWhen: Thursday night at 8
Where: Edmonton Event Centre
Tickets: $39.50 plus service charges at Ticketmaster, 451-8000
EDMONTON – When Elvis split the generations in 1956, he might not have been making a statement of disengagement between body and brain, but the message was clear to everyone else.
The apparently mindless clatter of rock ‘n’ roll appalled practically everyone over 15, but it did shake things up in a musically desiccated period.
That the same kids grooving to Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On may have eventually wanted to pick up those rhythmic cues and add something a little more thoughtful was probably inevitable. You can have fun tracing the beginnings of progressive rock if you want — the Beatles’ Revolver, Pink Floyd — but the fact is that musicians have been pushing at the genre’s 12-bar beginnings from the start.
Progressive rock in the ’70s — the heyday of the form — wedded the vitality of rock to the structural complexities of jazz, world music, classical. At its best — King Crimson, Gentle Giant, Peter Gabriel-era Genesis — it pointed a way out of an encroaching musical cul-de-sac. At its worst, prog laboured under the weight of an awful lot of pretension, an unbecoming embarrassment at basic rock ‘n’ roll.
That prog managed to hold on after punk rock reset the counter back to zero indicates unfinished business — whatever else, creative musicians are always going to want to shake off constraints. It’s pure irony that prog in the 21st century has found many devotees in musicians that started off playing punk.
Like The Mars Volta, a prog-rock outfit born out of the wreckage of post-hardcore punks At The Drive-In. You can barely find a focus in The Mars Volta’s music — it veers wildly between jazz, Latin and intricate hard rock — and the members are not interested in typecasting themselves musically. They’re more likely to point towards Werner Herzog films as primary influences.
“There are no training wheels,” spits out guitarist Cedric Bixler-Zavala about his band’s series of concept albums, the fourth of which, The Bedlam in Goliath, was released in January this year.
“There’s no one to hold your hand and explain things, no character that ‘plays a mean pinball.’ These are not obvious concept records — they’re steeped in symbolism, they’re a gigantic riddle.”
The recording of The Bedlam in Goliath had a run of bad luck attached to it, something that Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez attribute to the purchase of an Ouija board in Jerusalem.
“It’s all true,” he affirms about the spirit invasion blamed for tracks mysteriously disappearing, Bixler-Zavala’s foot surgery, and an engineer quitting after a nervous breakdown.
“Bedlam in Goliath is our Satanic Verses, our version of the film that van Gogh’s cousin (Theo) made that got him killed (Submission).”
Bixler-Zavala calls the offending Ouija board “cosmetic bait,” claiming that “in a weird way it found us, actively sought us out.
“The way I read it, most spirits are unfinished business; they’re lost and asking for someone to unravel the mystery of their deaths.”
It would be tempting to say that Canada’s own prog legends Rush have unfinished business to take care of, that their stock has dwindled since the days of
Caress of Steel or Farewell to Kings in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Tempting, but not true.
The power trio, who perform Tuesday, May 27, at Rexall Place, are still trundling along with a faithful fan base.
Last year’s Snakes and Arrows showed that the band had more to offer than their noted obsession with Objectivist author Ayn Rand or other science-fiction themes. The title of their latest album is a Buddhist allusion, the songs as forward-thinking and complicated as ever. The desire for prog was never more evident than when Snakes and Arrows hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts — no unfinished business to take care of there.
New York’s Coheed and Cambria often get compared with Rush, but guitarist Travis Stever doesn’t want to be lumped in with the current wave of prog rockers.
“Well, we’re always making progress as a band,” he says. “Whether we’re actually playing progressive rock or not, I’m not so sure. I think we’re a mixture of all different genres, but when you break it down, it’s all just rock anyways — we’re a rock band that experiments with every rock form, combining everything we love, but not intentionally.”
Coheed and Cambria also experiments with other media. The group’s albums are inspired by The Armory Wars, a series of science-fiction comic books written by singer Claudio Sanchez. Their fourth disc — Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume Two: No World for Tomorrow — completes the concept-album cycle, but Stevers notes that Sanchez has plenty more ideas within The Armory Wars universe to work with.
“Who knows what we’ll do musically after this,” Stevers shrugs.
“We don’t really feel that we have anything to prove, and we could just as likely be playing straight rock ‘n’ roll as so called ‘prog rock.’ Maybe the next album will be country.”
