The endlessly complex work of the Mars Volta gripped me for years. I became inspired by the roll of Jon Theodore‰’s drum line as he built up the beat with the band, never breaking perfect, percussive fluidity. The squeal of the guitar pulsing in and out of smooth and jagged rhythms got my heart beating. Rogue noises collided with blaring trumpets. Cluttered tracks filled with raw instrumentation plummeted into quiet in less than an instant, as the songs’ silence struck as hard as their heavy noise. The Mars Volta‰’s ecstatic wildness isn‰’t something you find in many other bands. They revel in the excess of packed tracks that betray endless efforts to detect time signature shifts and bassline-born transitions. It is unique and fascinating stuff.

Admittedly, The Mars Volta can be a polarizing band; people tend to love their music or else avoid it entirely. The Mars Volta’s sound changes a bit from album to album, as they change band members fairly often, but they always retain their distinguishing features. A Mars Volta song tends to use wild and varying time signatures and strange vocal effects with random noises thrown into the tracks, all of which make a four-minute song feel a day long. They are rough, complex and unrestrained, which can be grating compared to the cleaner and more straightforward standard of songs more commonly heard in music.

For a while, it seemed that The Mars Volta would divulge more and more their brand of precise but chaotic construction. Their first album Deloused in The Comatorium actually toned down a lot of The Mars Volta‰’s bizarre qualities, but their signature volatile, rough quality was more prominent in their two following albums. Then out of nowhere came their version of an “acoustic‰” album, the stripped-down and deflated Octahedron. They scaled back everything they did, and between the fiddling with time signatures, the crazy synths and the layered instrumentation, the album just did not sound much like the Mars Volta.

So when the band recently released a single called “The Malkin Jewel‰Û, a sample of their upcoming album Nocturniquet, I felt a wave of excitement and fear. Would The Mars Volta to live up to their potential, or produced another lackluster album like Octahedron? I hoped “The Malkin Jewel‰” might give me my answer.

“The Malkin Jewel‰” is not crisp or clean, but gains a raw intensity from unusually prominent vocals. For The Mars Volta, the drums or the guitar generally take precedent, so it is different to hear the vocalist take the lead, in the form of poisonous-sounding whispers in low and crooked tones, which whip up into shouts as the drums build into a dirty, sludgy feel. The song opens with a rough bleat from a guitar, which builds to a distorted bluesy rhythm that still never gets too energetic or leaps into an explosive solo. The bassist stretches out slow and matches the song’s off-blues feel.

Yet the drummer steals the show. While the other instruments seem reserved in their own acidic way, the drummer lays out a quick beat on the high hats, which clash louder as the perforations morph into solid rhythms. Unfortunately, the song creates momentum, but never properly uses it, and slumps off unceremoniously at the end. Still “The Malkin Jewel‰” does a good job of encapsulating the Mars Volta’s rough, eerie and fluid sound. The Mars Volta promises us a rich sound with their new release, but before fans go plunging down the mineshaft that is Nocturniquet, they should know that this small gem of a song might be the only diamond they find.
For extra fun, check out a game the Mars Volta made to accompany the song: http://www.themarsvolta.com/the-malkin-jewel/index.html

By Austin Ryan