Longtime readers will hopefully be aware of my love of The Mars Volta, but they'll also hopefully remember how often I've talked about the fine line between jammed-out space prog and unfocused meandering mess. Your Throwback Thursday song this week rides that line nicely.
To get at said song, we've got to throw it back to 2008's The Bedlam in Goliath, an album that rides that same line a little bit. Previous album Amputechture had a tendency to step over that line, but tempered this with more moments of instrumental brilliance. Follow-up Octahedron was a little too loose and free-form, with too much space for live work and not enough goodness on the record itself.
But Bedlam strikes a better balance, with tracks like "Cavalettas" leading the charge. Conventional song structures and instrumental choices aren't exactly de rigeur, but neither are some of the indulgent, extraneous passages that really weigh down a lot of later Mars Volta stuff. Agree with me? Disagree? Thoughts of any kind? Comment upon it, son!
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