DEEP LISTEN

The Mars Volta
De-Loused in the Comatorium
(Strummer/Universal, 2003)

By Marco Morelli


I've been listening to The Mars Volta CD, De-Loused in the Comatorium, with affection and amazement for two months now. Prior, I had heard to their 3-song EP, Tremulant, and felt similar emotions. I wish I could convey in words the depth, power, intensity, consciousness and beauty I experience listening to this music. All I can do is choose a few inconsequential adjectives. As always: You'll have to hear for yourself.

I CAN, however, ask myself, "Why?" What is it that is touched or awakened in me when I listen to TMV? Just to give a quick sense, the sound of the music is hard-core, fast, loud, complex, screaming, almost unnerving in its relentless energy. The lyrics are mostly indecipherable, often inscrutable, but the fragments one can discern feel poetic in some deep sense. I appreciate stray phrases such as, "they’ll pinprick the witness in ritual contrition" and "half mass commute through umbilical blisters." And this line, sung about a friend’s untimely death: "One day this chalk outline will circle this city..."

Which gets to a point. The CD is about and dedicated to a friend of band members Cedric Zavala and Omar Rodriguez—an El Paso artist named Julio Vanegas—who overdoses, goes into a coma for a week, then comes out and kills himself. The songs are supposed to take place during the week that Julio is in the coma, recreating the despair, lostness, memories, and fragmentation of a soul that can no longer bear to exist. Sounds like fun, I'm sure....

For some reason, I feel a deep sympathy with this. I don't romanticize the agony and confusion of Julio Vanegas. But I do feel the intensity of love of his friends, who to me poured an incredible amount of energy, tenderness, thought, and heart into the sounds and words that make up De-Loused.

This is not a “fun” album. But it’s not depressing either. It’s serious—just that—and I would not recommend asking it to be anything more or less. If your own consciousness resonates with it, for whatever karmic reasons, then I think you will find The Mars Volta to be a profound, soulful musical experience. And if not, that’s OK too.

The nice thing is, sometimes one can be deeply absorbed in a “serious” work of art, contemplating suffering and death, and later—even just one breath later—one can be laughing at antiks of Outkast. Or soaring in a multi-petaled soundscape of Ray Lynch. Or dancing to Madonna.... Our consciousness is infinite in its forms of Enjoyment. We only have to open to this Infinity—in all its facets—by truly hearing and feeling it.






Marco Morelli prostrates himself before the gods of rock in the record shops of Boulder, Colorado. Also by Marco: The Momo Prajñaputa Heart Sutra.