The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

To give you an idea of what human dandylion, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, is like - his credulousness, his naivety, his openness to new ideas, call it what you will - when asked if he believes in either magic or undiscovered science, he just says: “Yes. Of course I do.”

And that’s the problem that most people have with The Mars Volta right. When vocalist Cedric and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez split away from the crumbling At The Drive-In people were expecting yet more pared down, Fugazi-inspired, post hardcore. Instead what they got was a technicolour nail bomb explosion of ideas, taking in post rock, prog, free jazz, fusion, punk and heavy metal, with lyrical themes to match this magpie approach. Their first album De-Loused In The Comatorium was a speculative narrative tracing the ‘adventures’ of their friend Julio Venegas as he tried to fight his way out of a drug-induced coma before, in reality, he committed suicide by jumping from a bridge. Their second album Frances The Mute was also inspired by the death of a friend. The album is populated by characters described in a diary that their late sound manipulator Jeremy Ward discovered in a car while working as a repo man. Interestingly enough, they played their third album Amputechture with a relatively straight bat and, even though it was still pulverising, it wasn’t as engaging.

Well, they’re back with an album that’s the equal of their debut in terms of quality and probably more sonically adventurous. But those with a gag reflex triggered by the merest whiff of Dungeons and Dragons tomfoolery will never get close to experiencing the unhinged joy of The Bedlam In Goliath because of the mysterious/preposterous (delete according to taste) back story that comes with the record.

Speaking just days before Christmas, Cedric launches into a labyrinthine and plainly potty story about how Omar had stumbled upon an antiques dealer in a flea market in Jerusalem who wished to sell him a Ouija board: “I think that the gentleman who sold it to him singled him out as not the everyday tourist because he brought him in off the street into his shop where he had many different things for sale - taxidermied talons that were candle holders and things of that nature. Omar bought it because he knew I would be into it. He knows of my obsessive-compulsive gambler’s nature. Essentially, using the board for the first time was like the first time you try smoking cocaine or something, you always want to relive the first hit you got.”

The band were on an interminably long tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and started using the speaking board, which they christened The Soothsayer, on a regular basis. “We didn’t let anyone know that we had it. In a weird way it was as if we had a new drug and we didn’t want to share it with anyone,” continues Cedric. “Little by little I started to write down everything that was coming out of it and it was better than anything I could have come up with at the time. The board had pre-Aramaic writing on it. We hired people to translate the poetry. One of them gave us back our money and didn’t want anything to do with us. The core story that I picked up in hindsight is about an honour killing. It’s the story of a man and a woman and her mother. It is about two female spirit voices trying to talk over a male spirit voice and convince us to tell this story to people.”

Then the voices combined to become one voice; that of the Goliath. Through an intermediary, Mr Tourniquet, the spirit started asking for things in return. “It wanted to try to convince us to trade places with it and provide it with a vessel,” explains Cedric. “He demanded certain things that I promised Omar I wouldn’t talk about. But this translated into trading places with it physically. And trading places with it physically is a hard task, so I can only think that it was implying that I take someone’s life. That was the gist of what it wanted.”

From this point on, the recording of the album collapsed into chaos. Their long time engineer accused them of making music with “evil intent” and had a full-blown nervous breakdown. Omar’s loft space flooded. Entire tracks vanished from tape. Noises appeared on the tape and instruments disappeared from the tape, deus ex machina. So the guitarist did what any sensible musician would do: he took the damned Soothsayer out to the desert and buried it.

Over the hour that Cedric talks, there isn’t a glint in his eye or a smirk on his chops. He’s deadly serious about what he’s saying: “I don’t mind that people will find this story preposterous. That’s fine. We had a lot of the tapes for the album blessed after a while because we got that scared. I think the common misconception is that we’ve concocted this story to sell an album, but most people who like Mars Volta would have bought it if it was a story about a kid with a band or a Ouija board. There are people who operate on blind faith with this band. I still do believe in my heart that it’s a cultural phenomenon - whether or not you come from the stiff medium of organised religion in the United States or whether you come from the hot medium of worshiping in a tepee in South America.”

Preposterous? Yes. A fictional story? Of course. A lie? I’m not so sure. I’m pretty sure that Cedric believes everything he’s saying. And if this is the kind of fuel it’s taken to power The Mars Volta back up to full strength then I’m all for it, and that’s a fact.