Continuing the autobiography of today’s editor, a kid in high school would tell me I looked like the lead singer of this band every day in the lunch line…
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[4.50]
Rebecca Toennessen: Releasing a single from a concept album might make a single seem impenetrable to understand without the context of the album, and sometimes TMV singles are awful — the butchered ‘L’Via L’Viaquez’ breaks my heart. “The Malkin Jewel” is a shorter Volta song, (for them) and it’s intensely addictive. Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s threatening growl is just barely controlled; you know you’re going to get some serious Cedric Belting, and as ever, deliciously murderous lyrics. [Other TMV song topics: kidnapping, umbillical things, a taunting of ravens etc.] Here we get a glorious: “When all the traps in the cellar go clickety click/you know I’m gonna set them for you/and all the rats in the cellar form a vermin of steps/you know they’re gonna take me to you.” As a Volta fan I think “Ah yes, a vermin of steps, of course. Is that like a necklace of follices with sabertooth monocles?” But knowing the concept behind the song isn’t necessary to enjoy it; in fact it’s too early to really understand, as lyrics are still being puzzled over as to who is who in this storyline based on Solomon Grundy (both the nursery rhyme and comic characters). The Malkin Jewel is my favourite kind of Mars Volta This.
[10]
Iain Mew: This has exactly the unconventional structural approach that is to be expected from The Mars Volta, including plenty of disorientating two-songs-playing-at-once rhythms and a keyboard onslaught which arrives late but makes up for lost time. That’s something that I tend to dig, but it’s actually the sneering rat-a-tat chorus where “The Malkin Jewel” really excels and some of the rest sags a bit.
[6]
Anthony Easton: You know how some English Rockers playing at being American become so real that they might as well just move to Memphis and pretend to be Elvis or Flannery O’Connor? Mars Volta makes me wonder what happens when they are already American, so they can’t play house with any amount of verisimilitude. It’s just constructing something on wet sand, so it collapses, right?
[2]
Alfred Soto: It takes a certain set of skills to record a piece this disjointed, inconclusive, spiky, and gross. Lest my words be construed as compliments let me remind listeners that there’s an organ solo.
[2]
Brad Shoup: Though this tones down the Volta’s trademark witless patchwork thrash in favor of appreciable dynamics, one could still play Prog Bingo with the text. I’ve got “taffeta,” “bivouac,” “harlot” and “lilac” for starters. How can such cool dudes have stayed so far from fun for so long?
[5]
Zach Lyon: The MV continue to write music within their own little locked box, which is also where they keep their adoring fanbase and their collection of albums recorded before 1983, when time stopped. It’s a cool-looking box, but I’m not about to spend an entire week trying to decode the puzzle that opens it. Not sure what any of this has to do with Michelle Malkin.
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