Album Recommendation: The Bedlam in Goliath by The Mars Volta (2008)

Do I dare call this a retro review? I can’t help but smile at the alliteration (we love a good alliteration) and yet also be saddened by the inexorable passage of time. I remember working at Zia Record Exchange when this came out, so how old can it possibly be?

Oh.

Well, regardless, I’m on record with complex (and ever-evolving) thoughts on The Mars Volta’s body of work—having once written: “something about the need to embrace the most obtuse directions for a lot of their music kept a lot of it from being something I’d choose to seek out. And while I liked De-Loused and Frances the Mute, it was frustrating to constantly have them swerve left when I had the gut feeling that, you know, a right turn might be okay too.” 

Even so, every couple of years I’d try to go through their back catalog and see if anything clicked. And early this year, I put on The Bedlam in Goliath on a whim. After all, 2022’s self-titled record from The Mars Volta had made it into my top albums of that year, so it was probably time to revisit the records I’d bounced off of in the past.

And, reader, this time something clicked. Opener “Aberinkula” doesn’t so much start as it explodes like the big bang: frighteningly hot and spiraling out in every direction at near the speed of light. Sure, it sounds like a wall of noise, and I think that wall had just been too high for me to scale in the past. But something about that early day in January had me primed to get my head over that wall and fall into the cacophonous, terrifying whirlpool that is The Bedlam in Goliath. Yes, as a whole, it’s pretty long and can be an exhausting listen, but I think that only adds to the overwhelming nature of it all. There is some sort of narrative going on—something about a cursed Ouija board (and apparently the creation of this album, in and of itself, was an incredibly fraught experience)—but all that really melts away in the unrelenting forward motion as bandleaders Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodríguez-López capture ball lightning in a Tesla coil.

I really do recommend listening to the whole record if you can set aside the time and get in the right headspace, but for a brief glimpse, I’ll post the song “Agadez,” which is actually one of the handful of tracks that doesn’t explode out of the gate in the first few seconds, so it might be a bit more digestible as a single. Still, I think the song is a good representation of the album as a whole, especially as it starts to freak out in the second half. Even 16 years later, this project sounds innovative, nervy, and entirely unique in its approach to off-kilter art-rock. The Mars Volta go on tour early next year, and I hope it indicates that this pair of veteran weirdos will still deliver future surprises.