Mars Volta Maintain Their Intensity While Mellowing Out

Posted on Sep 10th 2009 3:30PM by Benjy Eisen
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A mellow Mars Volta? Never say never. "I definitely see it happening," Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez admits to Spinner. But just don't confuse "mellow" for "less intense." As the band's new album, 'Octahedron,' proves, the Volta boys don't always have to be shredding faces to get your full attention.

"As people get older, the energy changes. It has to. If not, you'd be a fool," says Omar, now in his early 30s. "Your energy has to change because life is changing, your perspective is changing. It's not that it's any less intense or anything, it's just different. And there are some people who argue that what we can refer to here as mellower in the life of an artist or in a person as they grow older, some people refer to it as quite the opposite -- they refer to it as more intense and more mature and much, much deeper. You know, there's this saying that still waters run deep. That's what I'm really interested in is what's beneath the surface."

OK, now it's starting to sound a lot more like the Mars Volta we're used to. And as O-Rod points out, every Volta album has had one of these quieter-but-no-less-intense moments, whether it's 'The Widow' from the album 'Francis the Mute' or 'El Ciervo Vulnerado' from 'Amputechture.' As for the new disc, 'Ochtahedron,' being a more mellow album overall, Omar says that the key is to look at the bigger picture -- instead viewing each song as one slice of a bigger album, each album is actually one slice of a larger masterwork, with a very conscious sense of conceptual continuity among them.

"All the Mars Volta records, Quintet records, solo records, films, videos, interviews -- all of it is one big project," Omar says. By his account, last year's 'The Bedlam in Goliath' was Mars Volta's most aggressive album to date. "So it's only natural that it would be followed by a very mellow record," he says. "And who knows what comes next?"

We do, actually -- it's called a tour.