Mars Attacks... Again - The Mars Volta

Think chaotic, think in your face, think apocalyptic, think The Mars Volta. Until now, that is. The afroed kings of punk rock are slowing it down for new release 'Octahedron'. So what shape does the fifth record find them in? Beautiful, poetic and cohesive – but with all the screaming intensity we know and love from the 21st century’s answer to Led Zeppelin.

“It’s about kidnapping, vanishings, disappearances, things like that,” explains energetic frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala. “We’re honoring our threat of doing something simple.”

Simple for The Mars Volta musicians, is not how the rest of us use the word. Simple for the former At the Drive-In duo is pounding heartbeat drums, frenetic guitars and melodramatic synths. The only thing simple about the latest offering is you can understand the lyrics and hear a beautiful sometime falsetto voice behind them.

Very unlike The Mars Volta’s early ideology of beating up their instruments, gained from their At the Drive-In punk rock roots – roots that they may be making a welcome return to (but more on that later). “We’ll have dynamic in the set,” explains Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, the slightly smaller afro behind the music. “Instead of being three hours of being punched in the face, now you can get punched in the face, then have a slow dance right afterwards, then get punched in the face again.”

Genre-bending music is in the El Paso resident’s blood. A recent six month Mars Volta hiatus saw Omar make six solo records under the name Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group and shoot a couple of films. “My studio is in my house. I have to cross my studio to get to my kitchen, so there is no avoiding it,” says Omar. Not that he’d want to. The man dressed in black shirt and jacket teamed with a black train driver’s hat is as talented as they come. “This is fun for us. It’s not a job.”

The live band – made up of Ikey Owens on keyboards, bassist Juan Alderete poached from Racer X, thumping Thomas Pridgen on drums and Omar’s brother Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez hammering away at percussion and synthesizers – are always one step ahead of their label with future records already in the pipeline. Record they're fighting to be given a release date.

“There are a lot of finished records and ideas that are being kicked around. It’s a big messy room that you constantly have to organise into piles,” says Omar, adding: “When you’re organising things to create a record, you choose the eight most interesting tracks to you at that point. Sometimes one says 'I don’t belong here' and one from another pile says 'I wanna be part of that record.'”

Playtime for Omar is about giving birth to a creative little entity called music. It speaks to him in a way that only true geniuses can testify. “A record is no different than a child. One day it grows legs and starts to speak and it’s not all about you anymore. You have to come to a mutual agreement with the record itself. It may reject ideas and guide you once you’ve given it a vocabulary.”

Omar is not the only member to go down the solo road, with Cedric using the break to work on his own material. Not that he wants the fanfare. “I hope it can go out on Omar’s label. I don’t want people to be like 'Oh look, the singer’s making a record, too.' I want it to be under the radar – for fun.”