I stayed awake for four days in a row. I was delusional.

Alright kids, quit your yappin and come gather round ole uncle Hammertime. I’ve a story to tell, but I ain’t gonna tell it if you don’t shut yer traps! Alright, that’s better. Now you make yerself comfortable – wassat? Yeah, eating’s alright, just keep yer slobberin down to a minimum. This is a story about music, about life, about living and alrighty I might as well throw it in, about dying. I don’t want to hear any eatin!

Now I know you kids think you know about music. You got your ipods and your itunes and your ishuffles and it’s all about fuckin me, isn’t it? Have you even any idea what an “I” is? Course you don’t, and I doubt you have a mind to figure it out either. Go read some Hofstadter and come back and then we can talk. And don’t think that these two things are completely unrelated, either. As you’ll see, and I’ll try to spell it out for you in the fullness of our sacred and preciously limited time, digging music and understanding a self have quite a lot in common. Now as I was saying, you don’t know shit about music.

I know you think you do, and lest Uncle H-Time be caught with his pants down, allow me to explain. Don’t get you wrong - you like music. Some of the time some of you even love it. It’s the soundtrack to your favourite movies. You worship implicitly cool directors like Tarantino, even if you don’t know it, coz they tell you what’s hip so you don’t need to figure out for yaself. Never mind that he’s not interested in touching you, or getting inside you (don’t be crude) – he’s after the perfect pop movie moment, and he does what he does well. But the closest he gets to reality - to what’s real to you or me or anyone - is his craftily worn reels. That’s a pun right there. He’s havin a whale of a time, and we do too, but does anyone ever listen to his soundtracks after the movie? I said listen to, not buy.

What I mean to say is there’s a great many of you whippersnappers these days that get music incidentally. You bumped into the cinema and some music brushed off on you. You were takin the tv for a walk and you stepped in a song. TV shows, advertising, theme tunes, jingles, movies. Music is no more the focus of these things than it is the focus of video hits and a great many other shows of its plastic ilk. (I’d consider making an exception for Rage, which is a bit of a different story, and a topic for another day and in all likelihood another author. With a bit of luck, persistence and assistance, Rage delivers interesting musical experiences, but they’re of a different dimension to the one’s of which I’ll soon speak, real soon now my little ones.)

I can hear some of you in the back sniggering amongst yourselves, ol’ man Hammertime’s drunk again, he’s lost his wits, if he ever had ‘em in the first place. You’s the ones that listen to music all the time. Screw the soundtrack to a movie, this is the soundtrack of your lives. You were born with earphones in your little baby ears, and damned if they’re not still in there. Don’t worry, I know there’s no music comin out of em right now, you just leave em in there hoping people’ll leave you alone, or maybe realise how cool you are. You take those headphones on to the train, down the street, onto the bus. Sometimes you forge everlasting bonds with your contemporaries by wearing an earpiece each.

You’ve got a million songs in those miracles of modern design, and I’m deeply impressed by Apple’s marketing savvy, but there’s a few things that constrain your listening pleasure. For starters you barely listen to more than 10 seconds of each track. If we take modern day rampant short attention spanism to its logical conclusion - and yes, I’m afflicted too - then we’ll all be just constantly skipping songs, flipping channels – never stopping, ever. Sounds like fun. But I digress. Being out and about, you can’t really focus on the music. You got the friggin platform announcer competing for audiospace in yer head. You can’t give it the time and attention it needs, if you want to get out of it what’s in it, lurking in there, somewhere. Lurking inside the good stuff anyway. And then there’s the lovely shuffle mode, in which you get to listen to an utterly, utterly random selection of your own musical library. Which also prevents any buildup of mood, of atmosphere, and any unlocking of the precious fruits that some albums yield only to complete listening. Have you ever thought about how to create a really, truly random sequence? Is that even possible anyway? As I see it, there’s two kinds of randomness: the kind that’s miraculously built into the fabric of reality at the subatomic level, and the kind that’s for all purposes random, like a die. You gotta tap into one of these things if you want randomness. Either that or talk to someone under 25, who’ll pop it into conversation at quite predictable intervals.

High above and far beyond all this, you do listen, and you do enjoy, and f’crissakes your music means something to you. It speaks to you. It speaks, it raps, it adds useless and useful extra notes, it sings of life’s big themes – love, (much less often) hate, (more often) loathing (including self), pride. Pride is a big one. So many lucky people getting their pride taken for a ride in pimped out musical cars. And given today’s topic, we must add that it speaks in the voice and spirit of rock! There are beautiful voices, sweet melodies, driving guitars. Honest to goodness, down to earth, rockin’ out, heartfelt but ultimately really, really lame songs which tend to get played on Triple J a lot. Well please, ‘cause you’ve stuck around this long, do me the favour of noting all that, taking it in, and setting it aside. I’d like you to open your mind, and get ready to receive. Cause I’m going to talk about passion, about fury, about precision, about wince-inducing off notes, about strong and strange emotions.

I first heard about the Mars Volta when I was working in the old secondhandbookshop on City Rd. Run by the extreme left SRC, who invariably go on to become middle of the road Laborites. The future of Labor, even. Christ! Right above the footbridge, it was, until they moved it, not the bridge, but the shop, and then they moved the bridge too. I had Yoshimi Battles… on the stereo, and one of the custudents told me if I liked this I’d like the Mars Volta. Retrospectively viewing the comment, it was ridiculous. They’re two very different bands. But he was right, I do like them both, though not with the causality suggested by his remark. I soon fetched myself some Volta. I listened to the song Roulette Dares and was taken aback. It was a little chaotic and challenging at first, but I discovered a darn good rock song in there, complete with tension building intro, loud bits, quiet bits and noisy instrumentals. After a few listens, the song grew on me, and I was struck by just how heartfelt Cedric’s plaintive cry was. Though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Still don’t. Something about an exoskeleton and a delay. All the same, I gave it no thought for months. After these months, a conversation with a friend prompted me to invest in Frances the Mute. Now that’s a sentence in sore need of context. In this fashion, a hideously beautiful metamusical mushroom sprouted in my temporal lobes and I still can’t get the dang thing out.

Allow me to lay it out for you, my lovely ones, in big clear letters like George Bush on a battleship, my central thesis. Is that the Mars Volta are one of the top 5 rock bands ever, who have created a unique and good sound, that has an uncanny ability to embed itself into the fabric of your mind and no napisan or new age cleaning recipe could ever get it out, not that you’d want to. With the Mars Volta, there’s much in common with other musical experiences. You bop your head, you grin stupidly, you have your favourite bits. But there’s much in rare too. You try to sing along but it’s fuckin pointless. You realise that there’s no other band for which you can remember 10 discrete mind-numbingly powerful drum solos. There is no other band that quite illuminates the moody, murky, morbid, manic and maniacal backwaters of your mind like the Mars Volta.

Passion and Fury
TMV somehow remain sincere, ridiculously sincere given the lyrics and cd art work, yet it all makes sense. Like all good works of art, it has its internal logic. It sends you down a path of disgusting dissonant sounds and morbid, fifth grade lyrics, but after you’ve been down it a few times, it looks normal and everything else odd. Cedric has an amazing voice, there is no doubt of this. When I was passing through that ineffable first stage of listening to a band, I found it offputting. I was able to appreciate a bunch of other stuff they were doing, but his lyrics were silly, his voice nothing special. How wrong I was. His voice and words are still all those things, but he is flat out the best singer going round at the moment. It’s an implicitly understood fact that if you ever want to make a point in a song, you sing just a touch higher. You find that point of auditory contact that is somehow more meaningful, more sincere, more heartfelt, whatever the emotion involved. Cedric hits this note and then sings the rest of the song an octave higher. But he sings like he is possessed, and heck, maybe he is. After all, Bedlam is an album about a possession of sorts, a ride through the dead side with an ancient evil spirit named Goliath. To pre-empt a recurring theme, uncannily perfectly sense making.

Singing aside, the whole band plays with a passion rarely matched, in the studio or live. And when it is matched, the matching band probably doesn’t compete in areas like musical creativity or depth of emotion. A good example of this is when they were touring Frances at the Enmore theatre, and two band members were grabbing a bite to eat beforehand. Sage concertgoers recognised them (might have been Jon Theodore and the sax player) and said hello. Jon said that they’d try to play harder tonight than they ever have. I’m afraid I can’t back this up with statistics, but I was there and they played fucking hard. Over the two and a half hours straight they played, you became progressively more hypnotised, while retaining the ability to appreciate their excellent renditions. How many other bands can do that? Hell, they can’t even do it themselves all the time. When they toured Amputechture the show was good, but not great. Listening to it afterwards I realised it was great, which is useful but too late for people there on the night.

I’ve little idea what the band members are like. I’d like to interview them some day. Jon Theodore comes across as intelligent and thoughtful, someone who loves what he does. Hardly deserving of being thrown under the bus, but that’s what Cedric did when he said they had to fire him. Yes, Pridgen is a freak, but so is Jon. Maybe it’s a little in joke, but where are his fuckin manners? And I suspect it wasn’t, as it was said in an interview with some Italian kids that you wouldn’t think would be but of course was inevitably going to be translated and made available to everyone out there on the innernet. Bottom line: TMV operate on a plane of passion and force that few other bands match, let alone sustain, far from freakin exceed. They demand attention, and won’t tolerate being a background soundtrack to yer life.

Precision
Goddamn they are good musicians. This is what pushes them over the edge. It’s one thing to have ideas, to have attitude, to have energy, but to back it up with insanely advanced technical execution is just scary. It’s not that they play unplayable stuff, although it would be to the majority of weekend hacks out there. But when you combine the guitar, drums, singing and the rest of it, they’ve left the rest of the pack in their sick wake. You can switch off and listen, but you can also pay attention, and when you do you blow your mind cottoning on to what they’re doing. ‘Course when I say pay attention, I really mean pay attention. Too quick, too complex, too detailed to pick up all in one go. Maybe that’s the banal secret behind their genius, to add more and more layers, with sufficient precision and arranged with sufficient delicacy, until it takes three years of listening to the same song to finally hear everything on it. But I’d like to see someone else try. My ears aren’t sufficiently developed, sufficiently evolved in this lil ol lifetime I’ve got, to hear everything they’re doing. I speak mostly of drums, which I do hear most of, but I guarantee you right now in an ironclad fashion, serious musos will get even more out of a listen than I would. Of course, they don’t have the constellation of tastes, thought patterns and musical history that constitutes my distinct mental sphere, so their reaction will be different, quite different probably, but we’ll get to all that stuff later.

Off notes that’ll make ya wince
Dissonance is an explicit musical strategy of the Mars Volta. For some reason, it often works. Maybe it’s just the sweet, goddamned relief of finally hitting a sonorous note that makes it work, maybe it corrupts your senses into thinking this is normal. I found it hard to explain to my German friend Thomas that this five minutes of repetitive, dissonant noise was actually part of a good song. It’s just that there’s been too many times a horrible sounding song has suddenly wormed its way into my good books. They make you listen to their dissonance, cause you never know when something incredible’s about to happen. Who’s the fool, me or him?

When it comes to musical fineness, consistent high performance levels are hard to come by. It’s something I’ve come to accept, and for some reason relish in a Cedric-kinda way, that no matter which way you cut the steak of musical excellence, you’ll always hit some gristle. You can’t have one without the other. So it is with comedy, so it is with many other creative endeavours. To hit those moments of brilliance or insight or shocking hilarity, you gotta have plenty of misses too. Mars Volta is no exception, and there are some songs I just can’t listen to, and even a few that have gotten old. But that’s some fine gristle, because you’re eating it at the same time as a steak like no other.

Strong and strange emotions
TMV’s breakout album Deloused was accompanied by a booklet, with text. It is the story of Cerpin Taxt, the album’s protagonist, and inside it are found the lyrics amidst a much bigger story. But if you thought the lyrics were odd or hard to parse, you haven’t read the rest of the booklet! I’ve tried to read it three times and I still haven’t come close to finishing it. I think you have to be clinically insane to scan that whole thing, it’s crazy.

This music isn’t afraid of craziness. It looks insanity in the face and sees itself. And when we listen to it, we hear ourselves. Given sufficient lucidity, anyone will admit that the sanity of life and the world is a bit of a knife edge, off which we all fall at times. We could ignore it or forget about it. Or we could stop and take a closer look. Embrace it and see what happens. Deloused and Frances in particular show us a world where sanity is irrelevant, and we embrace it. They manage to make something strange and distant central and heart wrenching. Death is often present, not as a treated theme, but rather as wallpaper. Scratch that, as the air that we breathe, as we go about more germane tasks. The set, on which the real action happens. That which we take for granted.

You find yourself in a song, and they slip a line in, a riff, a sound, that wrenches your guts, that moves you, and not in a Bette Midler Beaches kinda way. No, there is no light, in the darkest of your furthest reaches. Trite, and brutal. One day this chalk outline will circle this city. And you believe it, you contemplate for a second a force so malevolent it’ll wipe out a whole fucking city. When they drag the lake, there’s nothing left at all. Love that line. An abortion that survived. Which makes complete sense when you know the story of the song.

Now I’m lost.

The utter lostness of inertiatic esp. (I hate referring to these songs by their titles.) Forlorn. Simple and forlorn. I’m lost, I’m lost right now, and there’s no friggin way out. You know how it’s a common parable in our society for someone to be lost? Utterly, hopelessly despairingly lost? Until they find a way out. Sweet redemption, sweet foundness. But this song’s protagonist never finds a way out. In fact if you stay tuned, the only way out is suicide. This song absolutely revels in the panic, fear and certitude of being lost, way, way out.

I’ve been lost before, many would say I’m lost now. But goddamned if I’m ever this lost, I’d probably go crazy. And listening to this song is a concession to craziness in a way. Jon Theodore’s drums that keep the beat and meld with the bass. The rhythms he keeps, the patterns he creates are so furious, so heavy, so precise and crisp and so perfectly in keeping with the flow of the song, that he really is irreplaceable.

Of course, they replaced him, and they’re not the same band any more. But Thomas “Theodore on coke” Pridgen somehow fits in, and we have a new Mars Volta, and they’re just as crazy as ever. Over time, I thought they lost something. They lost an edge, a fearfully crazy and soul piercingly emotional force, that was clearly present on Deloused and Frances, but that departed or turned into something else on Amputechture and Bedlam. Listening to Bedlam now, I’m not so sure. They’ve lost something, but they’re still there. They’re still massive, a presence, irritating, complex. In a word, intense. And as I keep listening, it’s building. Maybe Amputechture was an aberration. Freakin good album though.

At The Drive In was a darn good band, all things considered. Yet I doubt anyone who listened to their strange mix of anxious punk guessed it was harbouring the nascent mutant foetus of the Mars Volta. Or that Cedric Bixler Zavala would go on to sing like this. Or that Omar Rodriguez Lopez would go on to play guitar like this, or create music like this.

I won’t for a second argue the band’s perfection or incapacity to produce rubbish. But their music reaches such heights, so often, and they’re not the same heights. They somehow manage to keep finding new patterns, yet all somehow stamped with the same Mars Volta superpattern. If music were a balloon, and musicians the gas molecules inside it, then most artists would float about the centre and never glance the edges. Some pioneers make contact with the interior surface and push it in slightly different directions. Mars Volta pushes the surface so hard they pop out the umbilical cord onto the other side, and start twisting the balloon into different shapes like a clown. Okay, I may be exaggerating, but you’ll grant me that in my old age, won’t you?

If you want to understand the human mind, you can’t omit music. Every piece of music we hear succeeds to varying extents at impinging upon our constantly evolving selves. Multiple points of musical contact get sifted through the sieve of our senses. It’s like a little dance between you and the song, sometimes the dance works, sometimes it doesn’t. Some music never makes it within cooee of our beckoning arms, some gets there and steps on our toes, some fits so well with us that we never knew there was a separate dance partner. Good music fits so well that it changes the way you dance. And by that I mean it changes us, our selves, our souls. You couldn’t understand my soul without knowing something about the Mars Volta, Split Enz, Crash Test Dummies and Ween. Hey! Stop fuckin laughing! I’ll smack you for your impertinence. There is surprisingly little research out there about just what the fuck goes on when we have a song in our heads, when a song speaks to us emotionally, when we discover hidden aspects to it. But these are real, real phenomena, realer than a whole heap of bullshit which many professional government funded fully accredited paper publishin self respectin idiot cognitive scientists fritter away their hours on.

Let’s just take a little time out here, because you know what I’m talking about. Let’s suppose a sufficiently complex new song you hear. First few listens, you pick up on the chorus, overall flavour. Over time, you notice different things – bass line here, drum fill there, understood lyric over yonder way. All of a sudden, you’ve built up an expectation for a particular little bit – what the hell is a unit of music anyway? We’ll coin that another day – that is so sweetly satisfied when you hear it. A line, a note, a lick. Classic example “Hey now don’t dream it’s over.” Everyone knows that, right? When a song goes through your head when you’re not listening to it, you don’t hear the whole thing. You hear sections, especially these catchy bits I was talking about. And as you listen you accumulate these little patterns, and notice different levels of patterns and so on until your understanding of this song rivals your understanding of complex concepts and any other ideas you care to mention. The ideas we know make us, and songs are that integral to the way we think and who we are.

Back track to the dance. Some music you have to dance with a few, ungainly times, before you hit full swing. Like two clocks out of sync, it may take a while to line up, but when you do, the match is absolute. Some times you do five different dances with the same song, as you peel away the layers of a particularly fragrant aural onion. I’m going through that stage with Bedlam right now. And no, I do not associate onions in any way shape or figure or form with the Bedlam in Goliath.

Back track to the process of acclimatising to a song. As I said, and I saw you all nodding your wee heads, everyone who’s into music knows what I’m talking about. For music you grow to love, it’s quite a precious time, only you can’t appreciate it at the time cause the music doesn’t sound quite right. But you have faith that it will all come good. After a few listens, it starts to grow on you. Then you love it. I occasionally wonder what it’d be like to go back to that first listen. Not just of any Mars Volta song, but of what it was like to discover just what in god’s name they were doing, that Mars Volta thing they do. It’d be a bit like going back to the first beer, when it tasted wrong. We can still detect that first taste if we try, but it’s been so overridden by our accumulated knowledge and expectations about beer, it’s an afterthought, an aftertaste and not much more. It doesn’t change, we do. But it is nothing without us in the first place.

I’ve never had a band inhabit my mind and start shifting the furniture around like the Mars Volta. They take a seat, settle in and set to stabbing darkly coloured shards into your brain and into your mind. Jagged fragments left all over the fuckin place, and each time you pick one out you find another one lyin around in the vicinity. There’s even one shaped like Candy and a Currant Bun. I could write four'n'half thousand words about that song alone. Brilliant.

Well, I can see you all scratching yer itches so I’ll release you from my sweaty, greasy grip. But do check em out. If you’ve a mind a little like mine, or like mine was a couple of years ago, you may have a musical fit.