Saturday 17 June 2023
O2 Apollo, Manchester
****
Joyful return of the band after a decade away
In 2011, talking to Grant Moon of Prog about his second, jazz-infused, solo album Grace for Drowning, Steven Wilson said it’s easy to forget the role jazz played in the birth of prog rock, ‘it was when pop musicians started to incorporate their love of jazz and classical that progressive emerged.’ He cited Bill Bruford who played with Yes and King Crimson but was a jazz drummer at heart, and King Crimson co-founders Michael Giles and Ian McDonald who ‘both grew up listening to jazz’. Wilson said that later prog groups moved away from their jazz origins, but The Mars Volta retained the spirit of jazz at The Apollo, Manchester last night. There was fierce virtuosity from all the musicians, and very long solos Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on guitar – so long that two gentlemen in the row in front of me went to the toilet during one solo and came back before the solo had finished – and from Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on keyboards. Rather than earnestly recreating songs from their albums note-for-note, the band embraced the spirit of improvisation that marks the finest jazz. Remarkably though, vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala was able to replicate his stratospherically high vocals from the records without any strain.
But prog or jazz are labels that are too restrictive for the band. Perhaps what best defines them is the joyful virtuosity of prog and jazz, the percussive force and dance rhythms of some Latin American music, and sometimes the directness of indie music. At one point an enthusiastic audience member at the front of the mosh pit raised two fingers in the classic heavy metal ‘sign of the horns’, but sadly (for him perhaps) no heavy metal was forthcoming from the band.
The two leaders dominated the stage physically as well as musically. Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez made repeated, anxiously angular runs from his position near the centre of the stage to face new drummer Linda-Philomène Tsoungui, perhaps to that everything was ok with her. He needn’t have worried; her drumming was phenomenally good. At the start of the show, singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala appeared gradually and almost apologetically on a crest of dry ice , but after that he confidently roamed the stage, sometimes swinging his mic like Roger Daltrey, at other times swinging his hips to the infectious rhythms. Strangely, at a distance, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala looked rather like two indie rock heroes – Elvis Costello and Robert Smith of The Cure.
In a similar way to prog band Porcupine Tree, The Mars Volta were put on hiatus by their leader for around a decade – Porcupine Tree returning with a new album and a triumphant tour in 2022. The Mars Volta also returned with a new, self-titled, album last year (released in an acoustic version as Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazón earlier this year). But whereas Porcupine Tree played most of their new album on their last tour, The Mars Volta played only a handful of tracks from the new album, instead dipping into their early back catalogue with several tracks from De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003) and Frances the Mute (2005). The audience appreciated their choice – those two albums have become classics of the band’s eclectic, ambitious, frenetic and uplifting style.
Source: Steven Wilson on Grace For Drowning by Grant Moon, Prog magazine 2011, republished by Loudersound.com September 26, 2021