The Impossible Defence: Amputechture

What is that noise? What are these lengthy space-jazz drones, minute-long bass solos and yelped falsettos? And what, in god’s name, are “sabretooth monocles”? Uh-oh, it’s The Mars Volta. And not only that, it’s their ludicrously schizophrenic 2006 album Amputechture, the release that was described by Pitchfork as a “blizzard of onanism” and that finally outdid the majority of post-At the Drive-in goodwill by a good seventy minutes.

So what is it about Amputechture? Only six years earlier, Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez had the world queuing up to anoint At the Drive-in as the new kings of punk rock, the new Fugazi – the new Nirvana even. How exactly do you follow Relationship of Command? And is there any lasting artistic merit to being the new version of anything old? Amputechture, regardless of what anyone thinks of it, represents the duo’s most defiant rejection of that particular poisoned chalice.

It is of course completely over the top – Tetragrammaton moves erratically from phase to busy phase for sixteen minutes as Bixler-Zavala discovers new and possibly unnecessary octaves (how piercing can the word ‘glossolalia’ possibly be?) while ‘Meccamputechture’ launches with its own Jackson-esque yelps before launching into lengthy stretches of OCD-prog (in which the ‘D’ is for ‘Dub’). Meanwhile, ‘Humans’, we are told, are ‘Ornaments’ and ‘Persuasion deflowers your sympathy’. This is not a streamlined or elegant listen. It’s one that pushes the boundaries of taste as well as patience – in the way that any good piece of art should.

The album reflects the crossover between grotesque and ridiculous – it is a carnival in the true sense, reflecting Bixler-Zavala’s disdain for Catholicism (in interviews, Bixler-Zavala recanted a true story about a Romanian nun dying in a cellar, locked there by a priest who thought she was possessed), by holding it up to ridicule. With the exception of the haunting ‘Asilos Magdalena’, Amputechture is odd-shaped and ungainly, a carnival piece with the grimacing face of a gargoyle, the body of a snake; the wings of a crow and the slender arms of the Virgin Mary emerging from its eye sockets – something bizarre like that. It is an album that is as ugly, as strange and as powerful as the beast that it sets out to attack.
 

And while we’re talking about the carnivalesque, what about the snakehipped, street-party of a bassline that slinks its way through the closing three minutes of the Fania -meets-Zeppelin explosion of ‘Viscera Eyes’? Or the demonic, after-dark horror of ‘Day of the Baphomets’, in which Ikey Owens’ Korg CX-5 provides a shrieking, ghoulish chorus to Bixler-Zavala’s own exorcismic call-and-response babbling and the whole eight-piece ensemble descend into a hammering 1-2-3-4-5/1-2-3-4-5-6 riff that sounds like hell folding in on itself – until a bongo solo begins?

Bixler-Zavala sometimes compares the band to the League of Gentlemen, which suggests something about The Mars Volta that is not often considered, that they might possess – wait for it – a sense of humour. In that sense it is entirely possible to view Amputechture as a ludicrous, and occasionally danceable, gothic satire.

But the main thing – more than any of the preceding flood of hopeful conjecture - is that I just really love listening to it.