The Mars Volta -Scabdates

Thu 29th Dec, 2005 in Music Reviews

There are two types of people. People that get The Mars Volta and people that don’t. When De-Loused in the Comatorium, the band’s 2003 debut long player, came out I raved about these guys. I was pretty sure I was one of the people who got them. Then I saw them live. Like most of the others in the crowd, it didn’t take me long to figure out that The Mars Volta on record and The Mars Volta in concert were two completely different things.

Scabdates, the band’s first live album, sits somewhere between the two. While the majority of their live shows consist of a handful of songs buried somewhere beneath a pile of swirling jams of Floydian scale, this release is split into 12 tracks, making it a lot more accessible to the casual listener. The people who complain that the invention of the compact disc and time-coding “killed the album” have a point — Volta’s performances are start-to-finish affairs and very few of these tracks work outside the context of the album at all. On the other hand, breaking this 73-minute disc up into bite-sized chunks has no doubt produced a more marketable product.

Though Scabdates breaks The Mars Volta into more digestible mouthfuls, that is with regards to time only. Splitting the hour-and-a-bit into 12 does not turn Cicatraz, Haruspex and Caviglia into three-minute pop songs. There are the epic jams and experimental tangents that define the band . There are the countless bizarre and random samples that few other bands could pull off. There are the incoherent vocal spasms of Cedric Bixler-Zavala. If you’re uncomfortable with anything more than a verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure, don’t waste your money here.

For the fence-sitters though, Scabdates works a treat. Thanks to some slick production, the drugged-out experimentalism fits in well as a part of the overall sound — in comparison to the live setting, where the band’s effects and samples don’t always get along with the more conventional rock sounds. After two minutes of Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt an insane amount of fuzz comes through Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s guitar and, instead of throwing you off-guard, it fits perfectly into the flow of the song. By the time the album’s second track grinds to a reverberating halt, you’ve been able to pick out the melodies, the different instruments and all the other things that can so easily get lost in the mix — and this happens again and again throughout the early and middle stages of the LP with Concertina and Cicatraz.

In short, Scabdates sounds how The Mars Volta’s live show probably sounds in the band members’ heads. Rather than being disjointed and disorienting, the jams and songs flow seamlessly into each other with all of the edges smoothed off.

Though the production team may have worked a little too hard to round off all the rough edges on Scabdates to make it a true representation of the band in concert, the slick and seamless progression over 73 minutes is what makes this long player a success.