Contemporary music iconoclasts The Mars Volta return with another volcanic explosion of psychedelica, prog rock, jazz, funk and Latin sounds, corralled into The Bedlam in Goliath, studio album number four.

From the beginning, The Mars Volta have always harboured a reckless disregard for what’s come before them; in essence they are the epitome of “progressive”, refusing to confine themselves to any definable sound. That’s what makes them so hard to genre class: they can sound like Hendrix covering ‘70s-era Miles Davis, or Roger Waters leading Parliament Funkadelic on a bender worthy of a Hunter S. Thompson tome. Then there’s the swirls and washes of keyboards and God-knows-what electronic contraptions that add another abstract element to their idiosyncratic music.

The Bedlam in Goliath is a musical marathon, an explosion of technical ecstasy that is unrelenting for the entire 78 minutes. Whereas the band would once inject lengthy passages of ambient soundscape into their music, The Mars Volta have solidified their sound, continually pounding the ears of listeners with a barrage of eclectic instruments. Constant shifts in tempo and time signatures doesn’t make The Bedlam In Goliath an easy listen, but what’s life without a bit of a challenge? When the band launches into the phenomenal groove and funk of ‘Ilyena’, the planets align and everything makes sense.

This is 2008’s first musical masterpiece.