THE MARS VOLTA

La Realidad De Los Sueños CLOUDS HILL

Alt-prog heroes unearth lost treasure for 18-disc box set.

When Clouds Hill acquired the rights to The Mars Volta’s back catalogue, a grand vinyl reissue was inevitable. And this is truly grand: across 18 remastered vinyl LPs, La Realidad De Los Sueños lays bare the band’s fantastic discography and acts as a reminder of just how potent their music was.

Each of the six studio albums they made between 2003 and 2012 are included. Received ambivalently at the time, their dense and contrarian third LP, Amputechture, has aged well, while most recent album Noctourniquet is also overdue a re-examination. The latter is their most ambitious release besides 2003’s Rick Rubin produced debut De-Loused In The Comatorium, yet it stays consistent, firing on both cylinders right out of the gate on The Whip Hand and never letting up.

Most interesting for fans is be the inclusion of the unreleased eight-track Landscape Tantrums, fished out of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s personal archives and the only part of the box set available digitally. Recorded and produced by the band themselves before they teamed up with Rubin for De-Loused…, it serves as an alternate reality debut.

TMV were known in their early days for chaotic live performances and unhinged sound design, and they have said that Rubin’s subsequent versions of these tracks took that edge off. Where Rubin presented more consistent versions of Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s acrobatic vocal performances and Rodriguez-Lopez’s mercurial guitar playing, and noticeably tamed the sound effects and manipulation introduced by multi-instrumentalist Jeremy Ward, Landscape Tantrums is a chaotic, punk rock take on progressive rock that draws a much clearer line from their previous antics in posthardcore outfit At The Drive-In than De-Loused…. It’s psychedelic, disorienting, and, well, inconsistent. It has a lot more attitude than the released version, with a visceral energy that is much more in your face both in the performances and the mix. Except for the Landscape… version of Eriatarka, they can’t settle on riffs, ideas or melodies quite long enough to make them stick.

So is Landscape Tantrums a revelation? The answer depends on your viewpoint. It’s the record the fans hoped it would be, raw and uncompromising. At the same time, it illustrates that the Rubin version was, on balance, the version the band were right to release at the time. It seems unlikely that these raw, propulsive but unfocused songs would have been the breakout success that the debut proper was. If Landscape Tantrums is somebody excitedly giving directions down a bad phone line, then De-Loused In The Comatorium is a map.

A REMINDER OF JUST HOW POTENT THE MARS VOLTA’S MUSIC WAS.