The Mars Volta is a band of mystery. They’re detached, they’re impersonal…they’re brilliant. It’s commonly accepted that a concert should involve some connection between band and audience. By conventional thinking, this is often accomplished with a bit of friendly banter between songs or sing-along parts that blur the lines between performer and audience. But the Mars Volta is anything but a conventional band. They do things differently. Like the Octahedron album for which they’re touring, the show was a little bit more accessible than in the past. Cedric actually talked to the crowd, or at them at very least. The funny thing is it was only to dedicate the next song to people "who, like the band, are whoever the fuck they want to be." After said song, he again engaged the audience by elaborating, "People think our band is like fantasy football. That’s not music." Somehow, he managed to both disarm and alienate the crowd at the same time. No worry though, because no one goes to see the Mars Volta to have their fragile ego buffeted. They come for the same reason that the band plays, the music. And that’s just what they got.
The Mars Volta is a complete live experience. Even at a club as small as Baltimore’s Sonar, their light show adds to the psychedelic experience. While the rest of the band is relatively subdued, even Omar despite his wild riffs, Cedric is the centerpiece. His persona is a freaky mix of Jim Morrison’s dark shamanism and James Brown’s manic showmanship. While the show was somewhat scaled back, like Octahedron itself, they still showed the intense agility that allows them to burst from quiet passages into a madness that only the band can control. They carefully cultivate this airy,open trippiness and then, suddenly, they’re upon you with an almost oppressive ferocity. Even though the set list seems to be varying little from show to show, focusing more on the new record and their first two releases than on the wild, rambling experimentation of Amptechture or Bedlam in Goliath, there is little about the show that goes through the motions.
There really is no other band out there so totally focused on the one thing every band should be focused on, the music. They are, in a sense, shrouded in mystery, obscuring their personalities and instead allowing both the ethereal and the manic nature of the music to flourish.
