Album art created by Jeff Jordan
The stuff I listen to is really limited to just a few artists, in which would never fail to include Red Hot Chili Peppers, of course. Yah yah, I'm the kind of person who re-reads her favourite books up to 10 times, and replay songs I relish till it bloody hell pisses everyone around me. Another reason is I'm the lazy kind who don't refresh her songs in her player.
And currently on constant replay are songs from The Mars Volta's Amputechture.
The album's songs are noisy shite. The kind of shite that I enjoy, lah.
Their lyrics and the song titles don't make much sense as well. 'Viscera Eyes'? If viscera means intestines, what the hell are viscera eyes?
The Mars Volta's kind of music is so radio-unfriendly (also due to their length), the young ah beng working at your neighbourhood's store's Sembawang Music who's so eager to approach you with his 'may I helpchu' would return you that clueless face when you ask him to help you locate anything by 'The Mars Volta'.
I got acquainted with The Mars Volta when a friend's friend's friend who eventually became a friend, Dev, decided to bombard his new friends with the kind of sounds he listened to, sharing those music files and mtvs ever so often back then. He shared so many of them, and I've never a chance to listen to them all, that most of them resided in the 'my received files' folder in my brother's old comp.
Only when I read that John Frusciante, RHCP's guitarist, was featured within one of their songs, L'Via L'Viaquez, I started to take some interest in them. What I failed to notice earlier was Cedric Bixler-Zavala, the lead singer. Wah lao, sexy siah, his voice! Now, I can't find any word to describe it but the closest might be 'screeching'. Cedric makes screeching and spatting sounds sexy, especially those songs where he could be found singing in Spanish.
I'm not into the technicalities of music composition, so I'm not going to pretend to know things like 'guitar riffs', 'synthesizers' and that kind of thing. But The Mars Volta is all about that. Layers and layers of weird sounds fused together to create that noisy melody, which is strangely quite a beautiful oxymoron. And they say the genius behind all the sounds is Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.These people sure have names that are hard to pronounce.
On bus rides home from work with the earphones plugged in, I have urges of screeching along with Cedric, but what the hell is he singing about? Amputechture claims to be influenced greatly by different religions, not that I know any, due to my lack of interest in that topic.
That's progressive rock for you, I guess. I'm not going to try to get the deeper meaning of the lyrics, and just shaddup and listen to the music.
Wikipedia has more to say about the album, if you all are interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amputechture
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment