(Credit: Ross Halfin)
It’s an indication of the passionate responses both detractors and fans have to California prog-metal-funk-jazz-whatchamacallit act the Mars Volta, whose new album, “The Bedlam in Goliath,” is a funkier-than-ever, 70-minutes-plus cannon of energy and unpredictable mid-song shifts. (Asked if anyone tries to clap along during their frantic three-hour shows, singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala says, “Yeah, but it doesn’t ever work out.”) As if the record didn’t have enough going on musically, Bixler-Zavala’s cryptic lyrics were partially influenced by a supposedly haunted Ouija board that guitarist-producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez bought in Jerusalem.
From Glasgow, Scotland, Bixler-Zavala, 33, explained how the band defines “normal” and why “Bedlam” is meant to freak you out.
Other than the Ouija board, have any other games scared and inspired you? Like after playing Monopoly, have you ever said, “Oh, man that was crazy! I gotta write”?
[Laughs] No, no. I mean, I’m a high-school dropout. I barely understand the concept of currency or exchange rate. I rarely play games. It was just in both Omar’s and my obsessive-compulsive nature to play something that has a similar if not safer effect that drugs couldn’t provide.
Will the album haunt people too?
Well, I guess that’s the whole gist of it really…to make the audience participate and to see how much heightened paranoia you can instill by playing the game of Chinese telephone, where at the end of the game what you’d whispered in someone’s ear just becomes mutated and overblown and embellished [from] the way you started it. The whole nature of Ouija boards has so many strong opinions as it is, and so many strong urban legends attached to it. That’s part of putting it out there: to see if someone wants to keep playing it and be haunted maybe by themselves more than by the game.
The album sounds like you’re taking listeners on a crazy roller coaster in the dark.
Yeah. [Laughs] I like to look at our albums as if we’re making audio books. When I used to take road trips with my dad, he’d be listening and not reading “The Hunt for Red October.” I’ve always thought it would be interesting to make music for road trips and long plane rides where you don’t have to depend on the visual, where if the artist can be expressive well enough they can just use sound and vocabulary to take you visually where some movies take you already.
Then you must be concerned the jagged music will make people on road trips zigzag all over the place.
[Laughs] It depends. I guess it’s important that they do have the option to zigzag all over the place, ‘cause life is that way, you know?
I’m sure that will fly with the cops. Anyway, some people love you, but others hate you. How much do you enjoy the polarizing opinions?
I think we’re doing something right. I can’t tell you that I think we’re the best band or that we’re the most awesome band, but at least we take chances and the kind of chances that other musicians can only fantasize about. I think if someone can take the time to articulate in great detail why they don’t like our band, I know that we’ve done something for him culturally.
It takes time to bag on somebody. If I were to tell you about some of my ex-girlfriends, I might go into detail because at one point I was madly in love with them. But that’s the whole point is that I was madly in love with them, which is why in great detail I’m going to tell you how much I hate them now.
So people may not realize when they bash you that they’re expressing their love for an ex?
Yeah. Well, they might be expressing how much they long for something new in their lives and how much they hate change themselves and how it’s just a gigantic growing pain really.
What would it sound like if you decided to make a straight-ahead pop album?
We’ve been talking about [how] our next record is going to be an acoustic record, but I don’t know if we could ever do just straight-ahead. With us what people think [is] us trying to be arty and difficult is actually just us trying to sound normal.
