The Mars Volta – De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003)
You know these albums that you have to listen to over and over again until they open up and click for you? Because they’re too complex, weird or overwhelming to understand at the first listen? De-Loused is not one of them for me personally. It is complex, weird and overwhelming. But all the music I’ve listened to up until I discovered De-Loused had primed me for it. It had all of the things I appreciated in metal and hardcore but translated that into a completely different language and added so much more. This album showed me that the things I love about music can be found elsewhere and that there are much more exciting worlds of sound out there. It is also a time capsule into my early teenage years and the friends I made. So sorry that this one is going to be quite long,as I won’t get another chance to write about this crucial period in my life.
I discovered this album in late 2004 when I was 16 years old. Back then, I found out about interesting music mostly through recommendations by users in the gaming forum I was hosting. I had started this forum around two years earlier after being quite active in other, similar forums before. What had started as a forum about games increasingly turned into a music forum, because many of my peers there also started to get more interested in discovering new bands than playing the latest games. I was first introduced to metal this way and soon fell in love with punk and emocore. I would then introduce that music to some of my real life friends, who surprisingly also liked a lot of the things I discovered online. Two forum members were especially influential, “Eye Caramba” and “Gotrek”.
It started with AFI’s “Sing the Sorrow”, followed by Rise Against’s “Revolutions per Minute” and ended up at Coheed and Cambria’s “In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3”. These were probably the first bands I truly fell in love with, with Coheed being the first one that I really identified with. I was convinced I would get their emblem tattooed when I’ll turn 18, and when I met a girl at one of my first concerts who actually had that tattooed, I dared to tell her how cool that is and ended up getting her phone number. I would go to a Boysetsfire concert with her about a year later, in the middle of a school week in Munich, which was a two hour car ride from my hometown. I’m a bit shocked that my dad allowed me to do this, but am also incredibly grateful I was allowed to go to concerts at that young age. These cemented my love for music, starting with the first show (Rise Against with Alexisonfire) that I went to with a lot of friends. We took the opportunity to stay a few days at a deserted suburb apartment of one of my friend’s grandma in Stuttgart, drinking there and strolling around the city.
Coheed and Cambria’s blend of emo and progressive leanings was groundbreaking for me at the time. I was especially obsessed with their longer, more ambitious songs like “21:23” or “The Light and the Glass”, that took you on a real journey, shifting through various moods and musical styles (their first two albums surprisingly still held up for me when revisiting them, and I considered putting Silent Earth on my list). The Mars Volta were the logical next step, but it still took me about nine months until I dared listening to De-Loused for the first time. At the Drive-In had already been mentioned quite a lot on my forum, but I never got into “Relationship of Command” at the time. It should have been way easier than De-Loused, with it still being firmly rooted in Hardcore, which was the sound I was most accustomed to at that time. But it took me at least another year until ATDI finally clicked when I listened to “In/Casino/Out” and then another two-ish years until “Relationship” finally hooked me. I guess that album was too weird for how familiar it sounded.
De-Loused on the other hand sounded like nothing I had ever heard. I distinctly remember wondering if the riffs I heard were actually coming from electric guitars. Every song had percussion and keys. And they often seemed to collapse into weird soundscapes all of a sudden, only to hit you with an even more powerful version of a part that came earlier. It was a lot to take in, but at the same time, there were also lots of things I already knew and loved from other music. Metal made me appreciate (guitar) solos and technical mastery of one’s instrument. I loved the emotional outbursts of energy and rhythmic riffs of hardcore. And Coheed had prepared me for longer songs and a dude singing a bit higher and that being okay.
So when I listened to De-Loused at the CD booth of Müller Markt, I was instantly mesmerized. It sure helped that album opener “Inertiatic ESP” is a rather straight forward banger with more energy than is contained on entire records. Then we get into “Roulette Dares”, which somehow manages to keep that energy level, but now the music constantly ebbs and flows, going from frantic riffs to laid back jams that groove like nothing I had ever heard before. I stopped listening to the album at that point and bought it. My friend A. and me drove home in his car and listened to the whole album, and I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
This must have been November or December 2004, and De-Loused became my companion through the winter. I had enough money to buy about one CD per month, so it was a commitment. Even if you didn’t like the album at first, you listened to it constantly until you „got it“ (or had talked yourself into liking it). De-Loused was a breeze though, and it just kept on giving. I listened to it every morning on my bus ride to school (which you notice was quite long). We listened to it when we were driving around in my friend A.‘s red VW Golf Bon Jovi. And we listened to it in A.‘s parents’ basement, after we hit a bong in the small boiler room next to his bathroom.
There were so many layers to peel back and moments of sheer beauty to discover that this album taught me how to listen deeply. When revisiting it a few years ago and now for this list, I hadn’t listened to it for quite a while, and yet I still knew exactly what each instrument would play next on each song. De-Loused is an absolute masterclass in arrangement. Each song already starts out incredibly beautiful, but the band will always add something to an existing part that will make it even better, or save the best part for the end.
Take „Drunkship of Lanterns“, which will suck you into its haunting atmosphere from the beginning, tease a buildup, interrupt it with weird guitar noodling, revert to the first part, collapse into sound manipulation to give you a little time to breathe, then bring back that buildup but now add percussion, explode into the full version of what has been teased before with Cedric’s vocals, only to add even more energy with a guitar riff for the final stretch. After a little dub excursion, enter „Eriatarka“, beginning with a vocal melody you want to bathe in. Another short pause, riffs and drums climbing up, letting you know there‘s more. And then … „track marked amoeba landscape, cartwheel of scratches, dress the tapeworm as pet“. What? Never mind, we’re back to that beautiful verse, but this time it’s introduced by a gorgeous guitar lead. And a few minutes later, we’re listening to “Cicatriz ESP”, that distills everything that makes this album and band so great into a 12 minute masterpiece. I could go on and on like this, because every single moment of De-Loused is a special one. And because I can hit play in my head and listen to the whole album.
I happened to be very lucky to discover De-Loused in late 2004, because its follow up “Frances the Mute” was just around the corner in February 2005. Unlike its predecessor, that album was challenging and took me a lot of effort to crack. The same can be said for “Amputechture” and “The Bedlam in Goliath”. These albums aren’t as cohesive as De-Loused, which might be thanks to Rick Rubin playing the Reducer on their debut, something that was missing on the rest of their catalogue. That doesn’t change the fact that these are all groundbreaking albums, making TMV the band that defined me for the rest of my teenage years up until I left my home in 2008. Which is honestly something that makes me really proud of that teenage boy growing up in the cultural wasteland that is my hometown and region.
I’d like to go back to that boy and give him a pat on the back. Tell him that he’s on the right track. De-Loused opened up so much new music for me, starting with the more obvious next step of other albums by alternative bands going a bit more “prog” (Dredg’s “El Cielo” or Trail of Dead’s “Worlds Apart”, for instance). I’m pretty sure that De-Loused and TMV have influenced me musically in a much more profound way though. It’s not like I’ve listened to a lot of jazz or dub afterwards, but I’m sure the myriad of influences that Omar and Cedric distilled have shaped the way I feel and think about rhythm, composition and sound. But more importantly, this album got me excited about a whole life of discovering new music and making friends.
You know, my early teenage years were kinda rough. My childhood friends turned into assholes that weren’t particularly nice or encouraging. They made me feel bad about myself and together, we adopted a cynical worldview and skipped school to smoke weed or drink beer. Luckily, I found other friends in real life and online before I messed up my life like my old friends would soon do. Now I got to know new music via my online friends, and learned how to think and write about it more deeply and critically. I shared that music with my real life friends, and when I smoked weed with them, I felt comfortable and explored my love for music and for them in a good way. For once, I was the driver for new influences, making us go to concerts and thus creating eye opening experiences for us. It made me optimistic about what the world has to offer again, and it made me like myself and the person I was discovering to be. And those two skinny Latinos, who are best friends for life, who found the boundaries of hardcore and then exploded them, played an important role in all of this. So thank you Omar and Cedric, for making my life better with your love and music.
Quintessential track:
Drunkship of Lanterns
Entry could have also been:
- Coheed and Cambria – In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3
- Dredg – El Cielo
- … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – Worlds Apart
- The Fall of Troy – Ghostship EP (Demo Version)
- Radiohead – Hail to the Thief