The Bedlam in the Obscure Words with Religious Themes.

The Mars Volta
The Bedlam in Goliath
2008
7/10

The fourth album from the Mars Volta finds the band pondering a difficult, but common predicament. When your last album brought a step down in both critical and commercial reception after a career previously marked by enthusiastic fans and even more enthusiastic rock journalists, how do you go about putting the pieces back together?
For The Mars Volta, the answer seems to be to go back to what has worked before. Gone are (previous album) Amputechture’s individualized songs and thematic inconsistencies. Bedlam features the return of the album as capital-A Art. Featuring a backstory involving (the band swears) a production process plagued by an evil spirit, TMV returns to the single-story concept album format with songs that are mixed to run together, much like De-loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute before it.
The return to form is both the source of the album’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, the songs presented are just as strong as anything on their much-lauded first two albums, and the few truly new moments definitely stand out. Especially successful is the increased emphasis on instruments other than guitar, as wildly tweaked keyboards dance throughout the entire album and tracks such as “Soothsayer” feature beautiful string and horn arrangements (and do I hear a clarinet in there?) by guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. A stronger sense of melodic focus is also both evident and welcome. However, the album feels a bit like an epileptic fit, forgoing the slower melodic breaks usually inserted by the band, and causing The Mars Volta’s trademark freneticism to grow a bit tedious at times. Bedlam can also at times feel all too familiar, as the band seems to fall back on tricks that they know will work. To be fair, though, who can blame them? The Mars Volta has returned to what works because, well… it works.