The Mars Volta: The Bedlam In Goliath

It's a well-established fact that bands put out

albums far less frequently than they used to. (The Beatles, for instance, made

more than a dozen in seven years.) And yet The Mars Volta doesn't get much

attention for having released one album per year, like clockwork, since its

2003 debut De-Loused In The Comatorium. Granted, prolificacy

is one of the least attention-grabbing things about The Mars Volta. Singer

Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez have used the platform

they built as leaders of post-hardcore legend At The Drive-In as a launching

pad; they've since gone intergalactic with a sleek, questing form of prog.

The problem with The Bedlam In Goliath, the band's fourth

full-length, isn't that it shares prog's overproduction or pretense. Rather,

it's a bit undercooked. The band's frenzied rate of output seems to have

trampled any inner editor, and the result is a splat of concepts and virtuosity

that never coheres. The disc's opener, "Aberinkula," is a billion toy laser

guns going off at once, while the ballad "Tourniquet Man" degenerates from

stiff to silly as Bixler-Zavala piles on the Mickey Mouse effects and tries to

wade through remedial free-jazz. Rodriguez-Lopez isn't off the hook: In "Ilyena,"

he's responsible for perhaps the unfunkiest funk ever made, and his solos

throughout Bedlam buzz

and nag without eloquence or equilibrium. Now might be a good time for The Mars

Volta to step back, take some time off, and actually think their mighty ideas

through before chucking them all against the wall at once.