#cedric bixler zavala

[rroulettedares]

i want only your bleeding heart .

[emoloveallthetime]

Bitches hate when you serve inseparable music duo

[guerrilla-operator]

AT THE DRIVE-IN

[saveferris]

🎇🎇🎇🎇CEDRIC ATTACK

[voltamagica]

Omar & Cedric but it's that brown eyes/blue eyes meme

[poachersinyourhome]

bro really kneeled down and kissed omars guitar. we all hear the 💋 dont we?

[savedthescene]

Scans from omar's photography book, hunters in high heels

[smilesessions66]

atd-i @ cal state fullerton 1999 by bradley stemke

[schismusic]

Noctourniquet for Noctourniquet

A while back I reached out to Tumblr user @yourlocalsanitizedoctoling to thank her for her kind words regarding my piece about NIN's The Fragile. In her bio I read that she refers to herself as Noctourniquet, which was actually a bit of a conversation starter for us. Noctourniquet might be my favourite Mars Volta release; not the best – that would be Frances the Mute, of course – but the one that most resonates with my personal sensitivity. So that specific name took me all the way back to when I first listened to the record, sometime around December 2013. I don't exactly ever remember this time of year feeling especially magical or unique to me (and, for what it's worth, I suspect that my sister only really likes Christmas music more so than she does just about everything else about it), but I do remember how relevant this exact climate and weather were for my enjoyment of this record that I'd bought on a whim, as a massive fan of the first three Volta records, almost as if to prove all those professional reviewers wrong. I still maintain that they are wrong, and I still cherish the record to this day – way more so than their most recent outings, anyway, but also way more so than The Bedlam in Goliath, which is a story for another time. So I guess this was a sign to finally say my piece and own it, for real. Dear Tumblr user Noctorniquet, this one goes out for us, specifically.

So if you're familiar with the average Mars Volta record (if you're not, here's a little something) you might be feeling a bit confused right now. As usual, I'm not an inside guy, I bring nothing to the table – no scoop or profound insight or private information concerning the making of this album – but I have been listening to this record for more than ten years at this point and I feel quite strongly about it. For starters: TMV fans almost always make a point of underlining just how groundbreaking, daring, eclectic, et cetera et cetera et cetera the band was/is. And I mean, sure, I would be hardpressed not to agree with that, but part of the reason why I'm inclined to give them credit for this is the existence of Octahedron and, yes, Noctourniquet. The other part is the existence of De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute, more or less specifically: Amputechture is good and it tries a number of cool bits here and there but it's, you know, a very codified Mars Volta album for the time it came out at, and The Bedlam in Goliath is -- God, okay, let's take a deep breath and get this out of the way.

See, ideally this'd be a whole different post unto itself, a post that has more to do with the nature of music criticism and music fans than it does with Noctourniquet as an album. Look, it's simple: The Bedlam in Goliath is nowhere near as good as Noctourniquet or, fuck it!, even Octahedron, because it is not a good album by just about any metric. The long and short of it is: you know that meme that's like, this is what [insert band here] sounds like to people who hate them? Yeah, that's the entirety of The Bedlam in Goliath to me. It's overlong, overplayed, overcomplicated, its only direction is off the nearest fucking cliff, and I don't give a shit about any stories about ghosts and wiped hard drives and everything: how this is rated higher than Amputechture (or any of the releases after it) simply escapes me. I will say I'm sorry for the personal injuries sustained by the band, because I am a functioning fucking human being, but I'm sorry y'all: this is a bad album that displays no class at all. Except Ilyena, which is an honest-to-God good song, despite Thomas Pridgen's best attempts to deface it with sulphuric acid at every chance he gets to cram a fucking drum fill in.

Man, that's a load off my chest. DMs are open to death threats, by the way. Now back to an actual interesting record.

So the consensus about Noctourniquet seems to be that it's a record that displays the signs of a lack of internal cohesion, different visions for the project colliding and not merging properly, underbaked songs with uneven structures and glaringly lacking songwriting that manages to feel somewhat placeholder. I will go out on a limb and say this: all of this is true, actually, but this is specifically why the record should be cherished. Like, be fucking for real here: are we surprised that the band we all praise for their experimentation actually went out of their way to experiment with their sound? Worse than that: are we mad that they did, because this experimentation includes raising the synths' levels on the final mix? It's not like they completely abandoned guitars, or the occasional classic-Volta number, as per the song I just linked before this paragraph. There's just a whole bunch of stuff going on here (at least until track 8, but I'm getting ahead of myself). And the idea of future punk itself – it's not exactly new at all, one might argue that Noctourniquet is basically just synthpunk with extra steps, but aren't the extra steps kind of the point here? What truly makes Frances the Mute different from Brain Salad Surgery, Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Lateralus, Fear of a Blank Planet or even Script for a Jester's Tear, if not the extra steps?

One funny thing that I figured was worth including, since this entire post is basically turning into a journal entry. A friend of mine a while back posted an Instagram story with the song Nuclear Seasons. Wrong as I might be, I don't exactly expect The Mars Volta and Charli xcx to have much fanbase overlap, so in case you're not familiar it's one of the very earliest singles that Charli released as a signed artist (for obvious reasons, I'm not getting into the early mixtapes here, thank you for your cooperation). It's a whole bunch of Eighties clichés slapping you in the dick, ostensibly, but she does do one thing in the pre-chorus that just fucked me up hearing it for the first time. You'll hear it when you listen, I'm sure: there's at least two separate instances where Cedric Bixler-Zavala wrote vocal lines with that exact same sense of melody over Noctourniquet – the title track, for instance. This is to no one's detriment, but it does display very clearly just how zeitgeist-y the Mars Volta were being with this particular release. Some might potentially argue that it could be a net negative: after all, it's not like any of their other record felt particularly era-appropriate, if you ignore the smashing success of bands like Porcupine Tree, Muse and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead at the exact same time in the exact same circles, which – after typing it and re-reading it black-on-white – sure sounds like a really hard thing to ignore, now doesn't it? I'd still argue TMV is the superior band (Source Tags and Codes notwithstanding, maybe), if only by virtue of them releasing a record like Noctourniquet at what one could argue was their most broken. Not even a year after this dropped, Bosnian Rainbows looked like they were the next thing, then Antemasque for like thirty seconds flat – before everyone realized that one song sorta sucked – and then relative radio silence for a while. We were, essentially, left wondering. At the Drive-In reunited and made a couple more records, then disbanded again, then The Mars Volta reunited, released the same exact record twice and I didn't like it either time. It was a victory lap that clearly displayed the band has learned nothing of what Noctourniquet truly had to offer.

Deantoni Parks has an absolutely inorganic approach to groove and drumming that completely altered the way Volta songs were written. It made them more alien, harder to quantify and yet at the same time tighter, more clinical, laser-focused. The Mars Volta can write a radio song, they've proven it time and time again, which is why they just did not really do it for this one. Even The Malkin Jewel – lead fucking single for this thing, mind you – starts out sounding like it's coming for your carotid with a bread knife, wearing clown shoes. It's this impossible song that makes no fucking sense and sounds outright goofy on multiple occasions, and then it coalesces and has that big ass ending that we should all love so much in an ideal world. What went wrong here? Absolutely fucking nothing. It sounds like that intentionally, and it's that intentionality that I cannot help but respect. On Imago, the band starts off with this delicate emo-ass acoustic guitar arpeggio and then proceeds to absolutely mangle the bridge with shimmering synth arps, and the percussion gets smothered in slapback delay that turns it almost annoying and the track might be one of my highlights, specifically because of this. Even when the band goes medieval on the listener and tries a couple of the old tricks, the results sounds ice-cold and mechanical, and god do I love this fucking record. See next exhibit.

Granted, the record does lose a bit of steam in the second half. In Absentia, yet another banger, unfortunately just sort of inexplicably ends there, just like that, almost as if it was willingly cut by the band around the seven-minute mark so as to not turn it into "your usual Mars Volta thing"; and the record itself ends on Zed and Two Naughts (pretty good track, taken in itself), which basically just cuts the whole thing off with no particular qualms or time for reflection. I will say the track sequencing could be improved a bit, with some cuts here and there: Trinkets Pale of Moon, for instance, could have made a fun B-side, but as a whole ass track on the finished record? Eh. But then, just as you're looking the other way, the band hits you between the eyes with Vedamalady. I really don't know what to say about this anymore.

Does this not prove my point? Why is there so much beauty in what is, ostensibly, considered a "minor release" by just about anyone I've ever talked to, apart from this one stranger on Tumblr? And why is the beauty so apparent in spite (or perhaps because) of the unfinished, brutalist, stark naked nature of a record that actively got Cedric and Omar to argue, so much so that they had to call it quits for a while? No surprises that there was potential here, seeing as Omar immediately recruited a keyboard guy (Nicci Kasper) and this exact same drummer to make a new band, Bosnian Rainbows, that feels like a direct evolution/iteration on his exact sound. It is also a band that I love to death, and we sorta deserved a second album honestly, but that's a story for a different time. Point being: Noctourniquet sounds like a band falling apart, it is ostensibly unfinished, has way too many ideas and it never quite focuses on one or the other, its identity crisis is clear from the first FM bell arp all the way to the sudden full band stop at the end. And yet it holds so much potential to make it burst at the seams, and this potential feels so untapped, raw – alive, ultimately.

[rroulettedares]

this gravity is a quadriplegic horse and carriage

[emoloveallthetime]

Me when I pass the cars of humor and hilarity

[baiwaizai]

Here to post once every few months ok bye

[saveferris]

'ric y mar-ty

[gothsins]

happy pride month

[haluceongenic]

Roulette Dares live from “If This Ever Gets Weird”