The Mars Volta, "L'Via L'Viaquez"

I'd stopped keeping tabs on The Mars Volta around Bedlam in Goliath, when their ADD compositions started to blur, but I'm still sorry to see them break up this week. For all their overplaying and overabundance, The Mars Volta were a staggeringly original and inaccessible band for mainstream acceptance. Love them or love to hate them, and many metalheads did both, The Mars Volta's success was one for the team.



When I first reviewed The Marts Volta on this blog, I wrote that they were "a little like Phish to Rush's Grateful Dead...funkier, jammier, louder, and more Latin-tinged than the band whose place they're poised to inherit in today's music world. Like Phish, as well as (initially) Rush and the Grateful Dead, the Mars Volta are also insanely prolific, almost always on tour, ignored by rock radio, detested by hipsters and worshiped by dedicated musicians." Fighting to be the Pitchfork crowd's Rush was bold, and ultimately in vain, but as "L'Via L'Viaquez" proves, it was a worthy cause.