Shownotes Transcript
If you've got too many effects pedals to deal with on stage, the best move can actually be to find an extra person to help run your effects for you. That's doubly true for singers, who have enough to focus on without trying to remember to turn off the delay before they hit the chorus. Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton, and I'm so glad you've joined me to talk about bands with their own effects guy, bands who do their own effects, and sometimes bands with no effects at all.
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On this episode, we are going deep inside one of the darkest, most bewitching albums I've ever heard to plumb a sea of possible meanings buried beneath the cryptic lyrics and distorted guitars on the surface. So let's tune down the drums, turn on the tape delay, and dive in. ♪
Not every song comes to you begging for your approval, rolling over on its back with its tail wagging, just hoping against hope that you will immediately love it.
Some of the best songs, the best albums, and more broadly, some of the best works of art challenge you and leave you feeling held at arm's length until you fight your way in. I've often found myself initially pushed away by a work of art, be it an album, a film, a video game, or a novel, only to find that, with some persistence, I eventually develop a much richer and more rewarding relationship with it.
Thank you.
On today's episode, we are talking about just such a work. A work within a work, really, as we're talking about a challenging song off of a challenging album that, for all its dark imagery and sharp edges, remains deeply important to me to this day. That's right, it's time to talk about the Mars Volta. And their singular 2003 album, De-loused in the Comitorium. Turn me on, J.P.!
Specifically, the third track on the album, The Haunt of Roulette Dares.
The Haunt of Roulette Dares, or just Roulette Dares as I'll probably call it for most of this episode, is the third track and the second full song on the Mars Volta's breakthrough 2003 debut, De-loused in the Comitorium.
The album spins as a central, though far from isolated, celestial body in the sprawling, creative galaxy orbiting two artists, guitarist and composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and vocalist and writer Cedric Bixler-Zavala.
The two musicians, known among rock fans simply as Omar and Cedric, met in the early 90s as teens living in El Paso, Texas, each one already playing in various bands in the El Paso underground music scene. The two quickly formed an unusual and honestly really lovely friendship and creative partnership that would last at least until today.
After briefly terminating their partnership in the early 2010s, Omar and Cedric found their way back to one another just a few years later and even reunited the Mars Volta and are now touring with a pretty killer new lineup and even released a new album just a couple of years ago.
Back to the 1990s, though, Omar and Cedric had their first big success with their band At The Drive-In, whose breakout third album, Relationship of Command, was actually my introduction to them. Oh!
This is the track One-Armed Scissor off of that record, and while their later work would go much further afield than this in terms of style and ambition, Relationship of Command remains a pretty killer album with some great singing and guitar playing from Cedric and Omar respectively.
So I should say here that a lot of the biographical information I'm including in this episode is based on the 2023 documentary Omar and Cedric, If This Ever Gets Weird, directed by Nicholas Jack Davies and built atop an incredible collection of footage shot largely by the ever-documenting Rodriguez Lopez, who's quite a filmmaker in addition to his musical skills. The documentary is fantastic. It's beautiful, honestly. It's really something of a love story.
the tale of two guys who grew up together and really grew around one another and who were lucky enough to find a creative soulmate early in their lives. In the documentary, Omar describes how even as a teenager, he was immediately struck by what Cedric was doing musically and artistically.
He was playing with the older guys and what he was doing was like super interesting and it was very obvious that he was just more advanced and that he had something else going on in his brain. He operated by some other rules and that was very inspiring. ♪
He then tells the story of how the two met. They were in two separate bands sharing a rehearsal space, and Cedric, more established among the older guys who made up most of the band members, stood up for Omar at a crucial moment. I went to go rehearse at this garage. I've always looked younger than I am, so they were all making fun of me.
I had taken a white Dead Kennedy shirt and it was too big for me, so I cut the sleeves and I wore a black shirt under it. And Cedric stood up and he's all, I think it's cool. It's cool, man. From being picked on to having someone who was standing up for me, he gave me a lot of confidence. Cedric's memory of that initial spark really kind of sums it all up. What I saw in him was me, and I hope maybe what he saw in me is him. ♪
At the drive-in fell apart largely due to the pressures of their newfound success and Omar and Cedric took a beat to try to figure out what they wanted to do next. They knew they wanted to do it together but they weren't totally sure what it should look like. As they tell it, they wanted to define their next group to really take the time to figure out what they wanted in order to achieve something bigger and more particular than what they had been doing in ATDI.
Each articulated one core thing that they wanted to honor with the new group. Omar wanted to honor their roots, his Puerto Rican heritage and Bixler Zavala's Mexican background with Latin rhythms and Afro-Caribbean musical influences. ♪
For his part, Cedric wanted to honor their dead, having already lived through the loss of an inordinate number of friends and fellow musicians to drugs, accidents, and the general hardship of their life on the fringes. And thus the Maris Volta was born. Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric, Cedric
Rodriguez Lopez would write the music and produce the record, though for this album only, they brought on a ringer in the form of super producer Rick Rubin, who oversaw the album's creation and helped Omar and the band achieve their collective visions.
Before Ruben joined, they had actually recorded some initial versions of some of these songs, including Roulette Dares. There's a 2001 demo version floating around that I think features Blake Fleming on drums and Ava Gardner on bass. So this is a very early iteration of the band. ♪
There are also later demos, I think from a year later in 2002, that were just recently released by the Mars Volta on a record called Landscape Tantrums, where you can hear some more developed versions of the songs, not quite yet the versions that would make the album, but with a lot of the personnel that would eventually play on DeLoust. And this Landscape Tantrums version goes pretty hard. It hits a lot harder than the final version. The final version hits plenty hard. ♪
It always makes me really happy when bands release early versions of songs that I've come to know really well in their ultimate form. I think it's really interesting to hear how the drum parts changed from Blake Fleming, who was playing on that first demo, to John Theodore, who eventually took over the drum chair and then occupied it for many years. We'll get to him in a little bit.
For the album itself, Bixler Zavala would of course handle vocals, and he also wrote the lyrics and the overall story of the album, with assistance from Jeremy Ward, a longtime friend of the duo who provided dedicated effects across the album. He would sit with a table full of pedals, warping and reverberating Cedric's voice as he sang both on stage and in the studio.
According to Rodriguez-Lopez, it was Ward who contributed a lot of the stranger words to the Mars voltiverse, like "televators" or even the name "de-loused in the comatorium."
He doesn't get enough credit, or at least he didn't at the time, but he was an integral part of the band's imaginary. They also brought on their friend, keyboardist Isaiah Ikey Owens, who had played along with Ward in one of their earlier side projects, De Facto.
And for one half of the rhythm section, Gardner became unavailable for family reasons, so they called in a hell of a sub, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, who played bass on the entire album. ♪
And that just leaves the drums, which you're hearing right now. The great John Theodore joined the band for this record and became an essential linchpin of this album sound and of the Mars Volta sound overall. Though believe it or not, the intensity that he brought in the studio and then for several years on stage touring with the Mars Volta wasn't a given from the start. In the documentary, Rodriguez-Lopez recalls how he explained what he wanted from Theodore musically.
After several false starts and some discarded recordings, I finally called John Theodore. I picked him up at the airport with a little boombox in my car so I could play him the demos. I said, I want to do all these Latin rhythms, all this salsa stuff, but I want it to be in the context of an angry punk band. He was like, I will, but just so you know, Tony Allen says that the harder you hit, the less intellect you have.
I think it's safe to say that's the sound he got, and John Theodore's drumming on Delos in the Comitorium would go down as one of the greatest drum performances in history.
And so it was that six musicians headed into Rick Rubin's legendary Laurel Canyon recording studio, The Mansion, and they wound up making one of my favorite albums ever. Before we get into it, first, a content warning. Due to the subject matter of this album, I'll be mentioning some slightly darker stuff than I normally get into on Strong Songs.
drug abuse and suicide specifically, but also just some kind of gnarlier lyrics than I usually get into. So I just wanted to give you a heads up. Nothing super crazy, just felt worth mentioning. Also, and unrelatedly, I wanted to briefly explain my own relationship with D. Laust and the Comitorium because this album is very special to me personally.
In 2003, the year the album came out, I had just graduated from music school. I had moved across the country to San Francisco, and I was feeling adrift creatively, as I think is fairly common for people who go to art school or performing arts school.
I'd gotten my jazz saxophone performance degree, but I was so drawn to rock music, to experimental music, to writing songs and telling stories, to the power and beauty of the electric guitar, and all these types of music that I hadn't really studied in school. My brother in that was my friend Russell Kleiner, an incredible drummer who some of you will remember guesting on the show a few years back to explain funk drum grooves and to demonstrate some of them.
Russ was the first jazz musician I knew who listened not just to jazz, but to everything. And a lot of my taste post-graduation was shaped by his recommendations. So, of course, he recommended this album to me with this striking, bizarre name, DeLoused in the Comitorium. And his sheer enthusiasm for it got me to buy it on CD. It was 2003 at Amoeba Music in San Francisco. And I sat down and listened to it. Oh, boy!
I was initially overwhelmed, which makes sense since it's an overwhelming experience listening to this record. But I didn't know what to make of it. It was too intense, too powerful, just kind of too much. But a week after that first listen, I decided maybe I'll listen again. And that second time, I started to notice things. I started to make some connections and to better see the journey of the album in its entirety.
So I kept listening, and by the third listen and then the fourth listen, I found myself uncovering more and more in this album. Sounds and melodies and grooves and lyrical ideas like waystones along a perilous but beautiful path. You'll be the first to listen.
And at that point, I was hooked. I just kept listening. I listened dozens of times, each time finding new things to appreciate and hold on to. And over the course of several months, I fell in love with this album.
Deloused in the Comitorium remains one of the richest and most challenging listening experiences I've ever had, and even in the process of making this episode, I heard it new all over again and again. You're hearing the end of Inertiatic ESP, the second track on the album and the first full track on Deloused, which disintegrates into reverse delay ambient strangeness before transitioning...
into the reason that we're all here. Track three on DeLoust in the Comitorium, The Haunt of Roulette Dares. So let's get into it. Let's take a look under the hood and see what makes this song go. Go, check out my song!
Broadly speaking, Roulette d'Heures is in the key of A minor with a 3-4 time feel, though it's mixing several different meters and pulses, there's some 6-8 in there, which is true to Omar's goal of infusing the music with Latin and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Then again, saying that this is a song in A minor with a 3-4 time feel is a little like saying the Grand Canyon is a hole in the ground.
Technically accurate, but somewhat incomplete. So let's get right into the particulars with this opening section, since it gives a good sense of the major elements of this song. The guitar and the bass are playing a riff pretty close together. Those two instruments tend to move together in most sections of this song. The keyboards are providing more like blasts of
color to accentuate certain notes rather than playing all of the riffs along with the guitar. And then there's the drums set up against the rest of the rhythm section, providing furious rhythmic counterpoint and constant timbral and rhythmic evolution and complication. And then, of course, on top of all of that, there's Cedric's unmistakable vocals, cryptic lyrics peeling over the churn of the rest of the group.
Let's listen once to that beginning with no vocals, just to keep things a little bit simple, and try to listen for each instrument and see what you hear. You can feel that pulse, right? One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. Let's take out the drums, just listen to the bass and the guitar. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two.
So let's start there with that riff. This is a great riff. It's built around a lot of open strings on the guitar, and the first three notes, the defining three notes I would argue, A, C, and G, are striking and memorable. That's the root, the minor third, and the minor seventh in A, and ending on the minor seventh is a kind of a lifted and interesting place for the riff to turn around. So let's start there with that riff.
Those three notes also might sound familiar to you right now out of the context of the song, and that's because those three notes start several very famous melodies. There's The Carpenters' Close to You and Brickhusen Newly's Pure Imagination from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Those are also the three tones that play when an Xbox boots up. It's in a different key, but same intervals.
Which I only know because I wrote a whole article about that back when I was writing about video games like more than 10 years ago, which gives you a good sense of the kind of video game journalism I was into.
So right from the start, this riff is already a little more interesting than your average rock riff. It fits well on the guitar too. It starts on an open A string, then you run up to a C to an open G string and hit the B above it as well, which gives you a nice double stop and then just go back down. The bass follows the contour of the guitar part, especially the first time.
And then when it repeats, the bass drops down to an F for the first note, which suspends the initial riff over F. Then it moves to a G as usual, then to a D, and then a B, which further changes the harmonic context of the riff, even though the riff stays pretty much the same, except changing at the very end. So you go from one phrase with the bass and the guitar pretty much in alignment...
But then the second time, the bass diverges harmonically and changes the context of the riff. Now I'm playing whole notes in the bass there just to make it easier to hear how the bass is moving and what Flea is doing. Let me put both of those parts at tempo and see if I can match the bass and guitar on my own and see how that goes. ♪
Now, of course, I am a saxophonist first and foremost, though I've been getting better at guitar and practicing a lot over the last few years. And even just learning a couple of the riffs from this song has given me a deeper appreciation for what a great guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is. This is fantastic.
far from his most complex riff, even in this song, let alone on this album. But I still struggled with some of the blocking and some of the string beating. And if you've ever seen him play live, which I actually did when they were on tour for this album in 2004, they opened for A Perfect Circle. And watching him play live, he plays all of these parts as easy as breathing.
The next essential piece of this intro riff is, of course, John Theodore's drumming. And he is definitely hitting the drums as hard as instructed here, with his heart in his hand and blood running down his forearm, or whatever it was that Omar said to him. So you can really feel that 3-4 pulse. 1-2-3, 1-2-3. Theodore is accentuating that basic beat with a lot of triplet-y polyrhythms. Boom-ba-dat-dat-dat, boom-ba-dat-dat-dat.
Alright, let's see about recreating this thing. So I had fun trying to recreate Theodore's drum parts on my own using sample drums. They cannot sound like him, that's not possible, but the process was still instructive. So this is where he starts with a slightly more open groove then he transitions to halfway through this opening section. And remembering the thump, the pop, and the sizzle, let's start by just listening to the thump and the pop, the kick and the snare.
It's so aggressive and relentless. It's worth watching some videos of Theodore playing drums. He is like power personified when he gets behind the kit. And you can feel it in this kick and snare pattern, even this fake version. Now let's take out the thump and the pop. And we're left only with sizzle. Steady quarter notes on the crash cymbal. So let's bring in my bass and guitar recreations and put the whole thing together. ♪
Now listen to how the drum groove changes. He's tightened things up and added this stuttering figure on the snare and what sounds to me like an auxiliary stationary hi-hat. It's a very particular sound that I can't quite match. Listen to the actual recording of the drums. Can you hear it? It's this...
My guess is that that's a secondary hi-hat, which is something that you'll see on drum kits, particularly modern drum kits, where there's the main hi-hat, which you work with your foot and open and close, but you can get a secondary hi-hat, usually two smaller cymbals that are just kind of held together on a different part of the kit that you can combine with the main hi-hat or other cymbals or whatever you want to get a variety of different sounds. I've seen it called an X-hat.
a stationary hat, and I think that's what's going on here. And again, to return to the idea of timbre, of the way that an instrument sounds, that's the human element here. That's just this moment in time for you. That specific weird sound that John Theodore got by hitting a certain something. And then they captured that moment on tape and they preserved it for all time. And now we're just listening to it.
So let's listen back to My Little Recreation, if only to appreciate just how much more explosive the actual version is when we transition to that. And listen for everything that we just talked about. Pay attention to that guitar riff, starting with those first familiar three notes, and listen to how the bass changes halfway through, keeping the same rhythm but changing the harmonic context of the guitar riff. ♪
And listen to John Theodore's drum part, itself an evolution of Blake Fleming's drum part. First, a more open polyrhythmic groove that then transitions to a closed, stuttering beat partway in. Ears on, here we go. We've laid down everything else, so now let's talk about the vocals. Try me on, take over my soul
Roots of male cough I can't see all of them
Cedric Bixler Zavala is one of the most distinctive, inimitable vocalists I can think of. His incredible high register and unfailing intensity make the strongest first impression the first time you hear him, but I've always found him to be a notably versatile singer whose voice has so many characters and textures, and crucially, who can completely transform his voice on a dime. You can already hear that in this opening section. He opens with this commanding punk rock scream. Turn me on, check it!
But then transitions to this gentler, mixed-voice croon leading into the next section. So I'm in a ball
A big part of the overwhelming power of Bixler Zavala's singing comes from the lyrics that he's conveying. Lyrics that he wrote, along with Jeremy Ward. The opening lyrics to Roulette Dares give a sense of the generally cryptic, haunted energy of this song and this album. Transient jet lag, ectomimed bison, this is the haunt of Roulette Dares. Ruse of metacarpy, caveat emptor, which is to say, buyer beware, to all that enter here.
As lyrically abstract as Delouse can be, those lyrics still do convey the general intent of the album. They're filled with mutilation and body horror. This is an album that's often drowning in the blood of its own mind.
And that's by design. Delost in the Comitorium tells the story of Serpentaxed, a fictional character himself based on Julio Venegas, a friend of Omar's and Cedric's who spent years in a coma after overdosing and then, upon finally waking, took his own life. That dark descent is present in every moment of this album and every word of its lyrics. ♪
Specter Wheeler!
Let's just look at those words. Open wrists talk back again in the wounded of its skin. They'll pinprick the witness in a ritual contrition. The AM Trinity fell upon asphyxia derailed in the rattles of.
made its way through the tracks of a snail slouching whisper, a half-mass commute through umbilical blisters. Spectre will lurk. Radar has gathered. Midnight nooses from boxcar cadavers.
Like in one sense, you get what he's saying. You hear those words sung against this open, uneasily undulating chord progression that stands in such stark contrast to the overwhelming power and energy of the introductory section. You hear those words and you understand the queasy, dread-filled vibe of the song.
But I could not tell you for 100% certain what the AM Trinity is or why Midnight Nooses is spelled N-E-U-C-E-S. What I can tell you is that something is dying here and something else is being born. So we'll let midnight
Delost in the Comitorium is a bleak, haunted album. Listening to it feels like drowning, and then finally just trusting that I can breathe underwater, and then finding myself lost in a shadowy, sunken kingdom.
And there's beauty here, and a sort of absolution and catharsis, along with power and dread. It is profoundly true to Bixler Zavala's stated goal at the outset of honoring the band's dead, and there's peace and power in that honor that, for me at least, outshines the horror of death.
If you go and listen to this album, I sense that you'll feel the same way that I do. You'll be struck by the band's unusual dynamic range. They can go from a whisper to a roar in a split second, which initially felt disorienting, but as I learned and came to anticipate each shift, it eventually drew me closer to the band and their performance, and it became part of the journey that they were taking me on.
The shift from this verse into the first chorus is just such a transition, and there are more of those to come, so buckle up. It's so skeletal, judging at the railroad doing Nuts because this is
So yeah, let's talk about that chorus. Here the whole band crashes into an open sound, an open chord, and a halftime groove that feels very open compared with the more compressed groove of that opening riff. You know, John Theodore has gone from this at the beginning of the song to here playing this. It's still rocking, but there's a lot more space in between the notes, which makes it feel much more open.
Harmonically, it's not super complex. They start on a D, they walk down to A. The whole thing is mostly moving around in A minor, like most of this song, really. It is worth noticing that the riff here begins higher and moves down, so it's descending riff initially, as opposed to the riff at the start of the song, which begins down and moves up. So it's directionally opposed to the opening riff. And
And I really like this guitar riff, the guitar part that Omar plays, especially over on the left. I think he's overdubbed the guitar so there's two different versions. And over on the left, he plays this really cool part. It was fun to learn. He has written some incredibly complicated guitar parts. This is not one of his most complex parts. But even learning this was a challenge and provided a little window into the way that he comes up with guitar parts. He has a very distinct style on the fretboard.
This is me doing my best Omar impersonation. And listen to how that bass note on the left moves in opposition to the double stop that stays put. It's one of those very guitar-y things that sounds kind of pedestrian if you just play the notes on the piano, but with the particular sound and tension and, yes, timbre of the electric guitar, it transforms. ♪
The bass actually doesn't mirror that same movement. At least at first it stays on one note.
I went ahead and recreated this whole section with fake drums and bass just to see how it would sound, and it was fun. So check out my version, and then I'll transition back to the original and just try to hear that one bit of tension, the tension between the static bass note, at least the first time through, up against the moving bottom note on the guitar, while the top two notes on the guitar stay static. Ears on just for that one thing.
Let's add Cedric to the mix. That moment at the end of the chorus is so quintessentially Mars Volta. First, Cedric lays into that high C.
before the band snaps down in dynamics, before crashing back up. It's a hell of a pendulum swing on a song full of them. I also love how Cedric sings, It's because this is... And then the band finishes his sentence. It's because this is...
That variation on the opening riff is incredible. I want to move through it pretty quickly because I want to get to the next section, but just to touch on everything that just happened very briefly, sometimes with a few recreations of my own, the guitars begin the same opening riff we already heard and then do a snap break to this hard panned different part, these guitars chugging up a new ascending pattern that plays along with a new drum part from John Theodore. I recreated this part just for the fun of it.
Listen to Cedric on top. Hell yeah. And then this crazy guitar part. The Mars Volta has a lot of musical DNA from a lot of different artists and bands, and while I don't always hear Zeppelin in their sound, I definitely hear an echo of Robert Plant in those wails that Cedric adds over the new riff. And that final guitar riff...
These ascending three-note tritone clusters that make an immediate sort of guitar-y sense once you learn how to play them. It's just the kind of thing that Rodriguez Lopez likes to just casually throw into songs like it's no big deal. Like, sure, let's end a section with that riff. Why not? ♪
Listen back to that whole section, that modified first riff, and just try to hear all of those new elements that they've introduced as we transition into an extended instrumental interlude. This interlude arrives in two parts. This first part, a pulsing, almost droning section with Theodore's drums moving through a methodical, relentless pattern of displacement. ♪
And I'm just going to loop that first part so we can also focus on the guitar, keyboard, and ambient vocal effects, which are creating this shifting, disorienting, high-frequency soundscape.
These sounds, these dark cosmic conjurings, largely the work of Jeremy Ward as he manipulates layered delay and reverb pedals and who even knows what else, are a defining aspect not just of this song, but of this album.
Delouse transports the listener to a phantasmagorical sonic space with so many different shimmering, skittering screeches and undulations, like a shelf of malfunctioning radios in a deep-sea radio shack. ♪♪
All of that floats along above a steady drone from Flea and Theodore on the bass and drums. And I really like the drum part here because of how orderly it actually is. If you've ever learned or practiced drums, you've probably learned some basic rudiments, single stroke patterns that often progress according to a predictable pattern. Because.
becomes becomes and so on, each time moving the two sixteenth notes an eighth note further in the pattern. Thing is, those sorts of rudiments can actually translate into some pretty cool drum parts, as John Theodore clearly understood as he and the rest of the band constructed this instrumental interlude. Take this initial rhythm: That's an important rhythm.
Listen to him play it. Kick drum is four on the floor, and on snare and tom, he's playing that rhythm. It starts with those 16th notes right on one. And he plays that figure four times. And remember that this pulse is in three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two.
So next, he shifts those 16th notes over by one 8th note. What was becomes It's very similar, it's just syncopated because he's moved the 16th notes over.
Listen to the first two figures back to back and really notice how the 16th notes shift over by one eighth note. Da-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun becomes dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. And let the kick drum, which is just playing steady beats, let that be your guide.
Okay, so we've displaced it by one eighth note. What should come next? That's right, displacing the 16th notes by two eighth notes. So we go from... to... to... And of course, after that, he does it by three eighth notes. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.
And of course the next phrase should be four eighth notes which he doesn't quite do, he just plays four solid eighth note hits before dropping into a whole new drum figure for the next section.
I can't even imagine how many young drummers have brought this song into their lessons and how many drum teachers were thrilled to break down and explain this section to their students. It's so methodical and predictable in a way that I've always found kind of thrilling. Those two 16th notes shifting later and later and later in the phrase with each four repetitions until the cycle reaches its end and it transitions into something new.
So listen back to that section with the whole band in, but try to focus on the drums and count along with John Theodore as he works his way through that mathematical equation. And I know that to some of you this is going to be challenging, or maybe it'll seem impossible. Like when I'm singing each of these examples, you're zoning out. But you can learn how to count this, and this is one of those things with this album. If you try to meet the challenge, you will be rewarded.
and you'll start to hear how "da-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun" becomes "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun" becomes "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun" then "dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun" then "dun-dun-dun-dun" into the next section. Here we go. This second half of the interlude is a quintessential kite and anchor guitar solo from Rodriguez Lopez. It's a particularly ornate anchor, but I mean, listen to his kite fly.
I've long described that kind of solo as a kite and anchor solo because that's how it feels to me. That's sort of how I picture it. This robust, rhythmic anchor, usually the rhythm section, in this case, certainly the rhythm section in particular, John Theodore, the anchor is holding the string of a kite, and the kite is the soloist who flips and flips through the heavens, content to let go of the time and soar freely, knowing that the anchor will guide it back to earth when it's ready.
Here, Wright's effects work is the wind whipping through Rodriguez-Lopez's kite, keeping it spiraling in the air. It's so exhilarating, all the more so for the contrast it presents to Theodore's methodical drum part. It's more complex than the first part, but you can hear him implementing some of the same displacing, rudimental ideas.
It takes courage to let loose and be the kite in a song as intense as this. But courage is the flip side of fear. And in the documentary, I was struck by something that Rodriguez Lopez said about fear and why he and Cedric tended to seek it out.
I think some of us get a feeling of being alive the closer we can be to absolute terror. That feeling is like being so close to something so beautiful that can destroy you in a second's notice. I can just feel that during this guitar solo. He's flying so close.
That reprise of the opening riff and verse is similar to the first time it happened. You can hear this intense octave pedal, maybe a whammy pedal or a pog on the guitar, and some more pronounced ward effects screeching around in the left and right channel like poltergeists at the margins. Bixler Zavala's lyrics are particularly macabre here. Cranial bleeding, leeches train the living, cursed are those who speak its name.
And as he repeats the lyrics, caveat emptor to all that enter here, they go in a much more intense direction with it the second time, crashing into the second chorus. And just when you think the intensity has reached its peak,
One final thrashing convulsion, and we wake up somewhere new. Lazy harmony from F major 7 up to A minor. Theodore playing with such a gentle touch, Tony Allen would be proud. And Bixler Zavala doubling his croon in a raspy whisper, rattling the laughter, hinges splintering inside. The laughter hinges splintering.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪
Delouse in the Comitorium is such a dreamlike album, moving from scene to scene without logic or explanation, ever further from where you started, ever deeper into a strange landscape. But as scary as this album can be, and let's be real, as effectively as it channels the profound and so human fear of death, I always feel safe when I'm listening to it.
I know that these musicians are sharing my fear and that they'll carry me through it with them. At the end of this interlude, Bixler Zavala leads the band in one final restless surge to the surface as he cries out that crucial word, inside. And as if briefly waking, the band surges into one last chorus.
Before the song is spent and it's time to venture even deeper, this calming, Floyd-like jam floats along, all urgency and tumult jettisoned for the time being.
It's a placid, if somewhat uneasy, ending to an anxious, often destructive song. I've always felt like The Haunt of Roulette Dares is a transition point between the album's opening and its second act. Next comes Drunk Ship of Lanterns, an all-timer of a song title, and then the extended, ambient showstopper Cicatris ESP. And then it's on to the catharsis and tragedy of the album's somewhat ambiguous final act. ♪
Delouse in the Comitorium is a challenging album. There's no two ways about it. But in rising to that challenge, I found that this album enriched my life in ways I didn't even fully appreciate at the time and that have only resurfaced in making this episode and in watching that wonderful documentary about the life and many losses of its two primary architects.
While D. Laust was partly based on the story of Julio Venegas, his isn't the only ghost to haunt this album. Jeremy Ward, whose ambient effects and lyric contributions so helped define the story of Serpentaxed, died of an overdose in 2003, just before the album's release. He never saw his vision realized.
Ike Owens, whose keyboard playing added so much texture and life to this and many other Mars Volta albums and performances, would die ten years later while on tour. The more time passes, the more ghosts this album collects.
At the start of this episode, I mentioned how when Omar and Cedric started the Mars Volta, they spent some time thinking about what they wanted to honor with their new band. And I actually think it's worth hearing them tell that in their own words, since it's such an important part of understanding the meaning of this album and this music. We'll hear from Omar first, then a bit from Cedric, and then from Omar at the end. ♪
There was a focal point which was the music and what we were doing. I just said, "Listen, I just want to discover the culture of our group. We need the time to know what it is, know how we feel about it, know what we want to do." When we were first just talking about everything conceptually, we each get to pick one theme
Mine was to honor our roots. There's got to be more Latin rhythms, Guajira, huangou, bomba, or Afro-Caribbean percussion, and that I want you to sing more in Spanish. His was to honor our dead. Having been in a situation like where a lot of people that I played a lot of music with passed away at young ages, and so I guess just culturally this thing embedded in me to honor your dead.
That's how in sync we were. It's one and of the same thing. To honor your dead is to honor your roots. To honor your roots is to honor your dead. To remember is to live. And I called it the Mars Volta.
And that'll do it for my episode on The Mars Volta, The Haunt of Roulette Dares, and De Laust in the Comatorium. It's an album that's only grown more important to me over the 20 plus years since I first heard it. And I always knew I would make this episode, but it feels good to have finally done it, to have really put in the work and hopefully done some justice to this unquantifiable song, album, and band.
I hope that this episode inspires you to sit down with this album and really listen to it, even if you find this type of music intimidating. And if I could be so bold as to make some suggestions, listen with headphones, loud enough, but not too loud, don't hurt your hearing, and don't do anything else. Just set aside an hour, find a comfortable place to lie down or sit, and just act.
actively listen. Let your attention wander from instrument to instrument, words and phrases that you might pick out, but also just let it wander elsewhere to the spaces in your mind that only you can see. After you finish listening, I hope that you'll also take the time to watch the documentary that I referenced in this episode, Omar and Cedric, If This Ever Gets Weird. It is a beautiful document of a pair of intertwined creative lives, and I can't recommend it enough. I'll link to it in the show notes.
Thanks so much to everyone who supports Strong Songs on Patreon. I love making this show. I put so much work into it, and I am able to do that entirely because of all of you. So yeah, thanks so much. And anyone listening, if you liked this episode, consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash strong songs. Or, you know, you could just make a one-time donation. There's a link for that in the show notes as well.
I also hope that some of you have gone and checked out the redesigned Strong Song store. We've got a bunch of cool new merch there, including a couple of pieces featuring Strong Dog, a new mascot who is obviously and shamelessly based on my own dog, Appa. Last thing, I've actually been putting out my newsletter a lot more lately, and I aim to keep that up. So if you want to read some of my writing on music, go sign up for that.
All right. Strong Songs is recorded at the Caldera in Portland, Oregon, with production support from Emily Williams. Our show art is by the great Tom DJ. For a list of all the tools and software I used to make this show, check out the link in the show notes, where you'll also find social links, my newsletter, the Strong Songs Discord, and a bunch of other good stuff. That'll do it for now. I will see you all in two weeks. Until then, take care and keep listening. ♪
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