Annie Taylor recorded their third album between the rock band's US tour and concerts in Europe. It's called 'Out of Scale' and is characterized by intense emotions, chaotic relationships, and big dreams.

The band's first album, 'Sweet Mortality', brought them international fame seemingly out of nowhere. They recorded their second album, 'Inner Smile', in England; it was rougher, more honest. And now they have sharpened their style once again. Each song sounds different, yet inevitably follows on from the next. Distorted guitar and empowering grunge rage are followed by repetitive psychedelia – and then a thoughtful song, almost quiet: somewhere between Courtney Barnett and Wet Leg.

Doing your own thing, even if it's not the direct route, 'Out of Scale', outside the conformist standards—that's the message the album conveys and which is already embedded in the band's name. Annie Edson Taylor was a teacher from the USA who led a turbulent life and rubbed people up the wrong way. In 1901, she became the first person to plunge down Niagara Falls in a barrel. She was only injured on the back of her head. 'Out of Scale' motivates us to never stop dreaming. To constantly reinvent ourselves. And to resist stagnation.

TRACK LISTING

1. Alligator
2. Something Ain't Right
3. Lucidity
4. Fire
5. That City
6. The Cure
7. Overload 
8. The Ocean 
9. Silence
10. What Do You Have To Sell?
11. Places

'Noctourniquet' and then everything went black, at least for a while, at least for The Mars Volta. In the months and years following their fifth full-length, 'Octahedron', Omar kept on at his usual fearsome creative pace. In fact, he ramped up his output considerably, starting up his own Rodriguez Lopez Productions label and releasing a slew of solo albums. It was a practice he’d begun shortly after De-Loused’s release, with his solo debut 'A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume One', but as the decade reached its close, Omar grew to rely upon his solo recordings as an outlet for his prolific creativity, these albums often exploring musical pastures far beyond even The Mars Volta’s wide-ranging parameters. Before choosing to release music under his own name, Omar would always play it to Cedric first, to see if the frontman thought it had potential to become Mars Volta music.

Shortly after 'Octahedron's completion, Cedric flagged one batch of tracks Omar had cut with Deantoni Parks, a brilliant drummer and composer who’d briefly occupied the Mars Volta drumstool in-between Jon Theodore and Thomas Pridgen’s tenures, and whose volcanic creativity and unique, unpredictable approach to rhythm and composition had quickly made him one of Omar’s favourite artistic foils.

TRACK LISTING

1. The Whip Hand
2. Aegis
3. Dyslexicon
4. Empty Vessels Make The Loudest Sound 
5. The Malkin Jewel
6. Lapochka
7. In Absentia
8. Imago
9. Molochwalker
10. Trinkets Pale Of Moon
11. Vedamalady
12. Noctourniquet
13. Zed And Two Naughts

The Mars Volta's ninth studio album represents a significant milestone for the band, which has been continually reinventing itself for more than 20 years. With “Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacio," they deliver an album that celebrates their roots, allowing them to reconnect with their origins. Fans are invited to embark on a musical journey.

TRACK LISTING

1. Fin
2. Reina Tormenta
3. Enlazan Las Tinieblas
4. Mictlán
5. Nefilbata
6. Cue The Sun
7. Alba Del Orate
8. Voice In My Knives
9. Poseedora De Mi Sombra
10. Celaje
11. Vociferó
12. Mito De Los Trece Cielos
13. Un Disparo Al Vacío
14. Detrás De La Puerta Dorada
15. Maullidos
16. Morgana
17. Cue The Sun (Reprise)
18. Lucro Sucio

The Mars Volta - Que Dios TeMaldiga Mi Corazon (acoustic album of The Mars Volta) After the successful worldwide release of the studio album "The Mars Volta", the band also releases the album as an acoustic album. The harmonic album "Que Dios TeMaldiga Mi Corazon".

The Mars Volta plays a similar game: it is subtly subversive – end- lessly inventive, but never at the cost of the song. Many of the same val- ues that made The Mars Volta’s previous albums so ground-breaking, so acclaimed, are still present here, but they are employed in different, adroit ways. The Caribbean rhythms that powered their blistering earlier records still flourish across The Mars Volta – they aren’t the foreground now, but they ripple underneath each of these tracks.

Similarly, the big rock moves and proggy complexities of their landmark releases have given way for more sonic subtlety, for immediacy and directness. But while The Mars Volta shies away from Grand Guignol flourishes, it remains a dark, power- ful and affecting listen, mature and deeply satisfying in its restraint.

TRACK LISTING

1. Blacklight Shine  (acoustic)
2. Graveyard Love (acoustic)
3. Shore Story (acoustic)
4. Blank Condolences  (acoustic)
5. Vigil (acoustic)
6. Que Dios TeMaldiga Mi Corazon (acoustic)
7. Cerulea (acoustic)
8. Flash Burns From Flashbacks (acoustic)
9. Palm Full Of Crux (acoustic)
10. NoCaseGain (acoustic)
11. Tourmaline (acoustic)
12. Equus 3 (acoustic)
13. Collapsible Shoulders (acoustic)
14. The Requisition (acoustic)

Breaking a decade of omertà, The Mars Volta reawaken from their lengthy hiatus with an eponymous track that radically reshapes their paradigm. Formed by guitarist/composer Omar Rodríguez-López and singer/lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, The Mars Volta rose from the ashes of El Paso punk-rock firebrands At The Drive-In in 2001.

On a mission to “honour our roots and honour our dead”, The Mars Volta made music that fused the Latin sounds Rodríguez-López was raised on with the punk and underground noise he and Bixler-Zavala had immersed themselves in for years, and the futuristic visions they were tapping into.

The albums that followed were one-of-a-kind masterpieces, their songs of breath-taking complexity also possessing powerful emotional immediacy. After the group fell silent, a legion of devotees (including Kanye West) kept up an insistent drum-beat for their return. Now – a year after La Realidad De Los Sueños, a luxurious 18-LP box-set compiling their back catalogue, sold out its 5,000 print run in under 24 hours – the duo are back, accompanied this time by founder bassist Eva Gardner, drummer Willy Rodriguez Quiñones and keyboard-player Marcel Rodríguez-López.

This song shakes loose some of The Mars Volta’s long-standing shibboleths and the dizzying, abrasive prog stylings of earlier albums absent. Instead, The Mars Volta pulses with subtle brilliance, Caribbean rhythms underpinning sophisticated, turbulent songcraft.

This is The Mars Volta at their most mature, most concise, most focused. Their sound and fury channelled to greatest effect, The Mars Volta finds Rodríguez-López’s subterranean pop melodies driving Bixler-Zavala’s dark sci-fi tales of the occult and malevolent governments. Distilling all the passion, poetry and power at their fingertips, The Mars Volta is the most accessible music the group have ever recorded.

TRACK LISTING

1. Blacklight Shine 
2. Graveyard Love 
3. Shore Story 
4. Blank Condolences 
5. Vigil 
6. Que Dios Te Maldiga Mi Corazon
7. Cerulea 
8. Flash Burns From Flashbacks 
9. Palm Full Of Crux 
10. No Case Gain 
11. Tourmaline 
12. Equus 3 
13. Collapsible Shoulders 
14. The Requisition

Landscape Tantrums Lost for two decades, the recent rediscovery of Landscape Tantrums the first attempt at recording the music that would become The Mars Volta’s De-Loused In The Comatorium revealed an important and hitherto missing chapter in the group’s evolution. Selfrecorded by Omar (assisted by Jon DeBaun) at Burbank’s Mad Dog Studios within a head spinning four days, Landscape Tantrums captures De-Loused in somewhat embryonic form, though much of what would make The Mars Volta’s debut album such an electrifying, sublime experience was already in place: the fearless invention, the fusion of futurist rock elements and traditions from outside of the rock orthodoxy, the sense of virtuosity working in service of emotional effect. From a distance, The Mars Volta must have seemed as if they were on a high when they walked into the studio to record what they expected to be their debut album (“I didn’t think of it as demos or a dry run,” Omar says). The group had recently played the Coachella festival to rave reviews, a vindication of the quixotic risk Omar and Cedric had taken, quitting At The Drive In to lead such an uncompromising musical proposition.

Their debut EP, Tremulant, had similarly signalled their singular vision, and been rewarded with similarly positive feedback. But the truth was that The Mars Volta entered Mad Dog in tatters, scarcely believing anything other than failure lay within their reach. They’d recently lost their bassist, Eva Gardner, and parted ways with keyboard play Ikey Owens. Tensions were brewing with drummer Jon Theodore, too himself a replacement for founding drummer Blake Fleming Omar questioning Theodore’s commitment to the group. And sound manipulator Jeremy Michael Ward’s drug problem had gotten so far out of hand that he’d been sent to rehab, and wouldn’t return until two days into the Landscape Tantrums. The pressure upon Omar was intense, and it began to manifest in the form of physical and emotional breakdowns. His art was his life, but now he began to wonder if it was actually going to kill him. Under such heavy manners, miracles occurred at Mad Dog. Surely that’s the only way to describe the music contained on Landscape Tantrums, as Omar fashioned early versions of Inertiatic ESP, Drunkship Of Lanterns and Eriatarka that rivalled the Rick Rubin produced versions that ended up on De- Loused for intensity, precision and immediacy, as Cedric delivered a powerfully intimate reading of Televators, and as a bare bones version of the group sketched out the peaks of what would become their debut masterpiece in barely half a week, on a shoestring, and believing they wouldn’t last long enough to see it hit the shelves. Listening to Landscape Tantrums now, with the benefit of hindsight and the knowledge of what these songs will become, one notices Cedric has yet to fully find the voice that will lend The Mars Volta their devastating authority, that Eriatarka will evolve even further under Rick Rubin’s watch, and that the lyrics to De-Loused’s climactic chapter, Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt, have yet to be penned. But one also notices how lithe the group sound here, how hungry, and one appreciates the raw edge that Rubin would later polish to a venomous sharpness. More than mere historical curiosity, Landscape Tantrums is an essential text for the dedicated Mars Volta aficionado, and a breathtaking album in its own right.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of) [Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium]
2. Son Et Lumière (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)
3. Inertiatic ESP (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)
4. Drunkship Of Lanterns (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)
5. Eriatarka (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)

Side B
1. This Apparatus Must Be Unearthed (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium) 
2. Televators (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)
3. Take The Veil Cerpin Taxt (Unfinished Original Recordings Of De-Loused In The Comatorium)

The Starless Room is the debut solo album by Gallon Drunk mainman and PJ Harvey cohort James Johnston.

The Starless Room - The results are a revelation, and not just for James Johnston. Vast in its scope, visceral, intimate and instinctive - " I just followed whatever triggered an emotional response in me".

The Starless Room represents a remarkable distillation of both his lyrical obsessions and prodigious, arguably under-acknowledged talent. Suitably, it's the title track that encapsulates the romantic sweep of the record best, with its star at his most intense and Sebastian Hoffman's string arrangements at their most ambitious. For James Johnston, however, the greatest pleasure of all is a simple one: the songs' slow tempos, "Something I adore, like a lot of the Isaac Hayes or Ray Charles albums that I love. It almost feels like I'm listening to someone else's record." But it's not. It's James Johnston's debut solo album, The Starless Room. Like he said, it feels just right.

James Johnston - As well as playing with Gallon Drunk, James Johnston has spent considerable time working with others: A mid 90s spell as a touring guitarist in The Bad Seeds led to a full role in Nick Cave's band between 2003 and 2008, and he's performed regularly with other iconic acts, including Lydia Lunch, Faust, and, currently, PJ Harvey, on whose The Hope Six Demolition Project Johnston appears. But if it sounds like he's softened on this album, he argues powerfully otherwise. "The band's records have quite an earthy feel, but in a way this is rawer, more focused and direct, musically and emotionally. The last Gallon Drunk record's my favourite, and it was certain elements of that which I really wanted to take further, to strip away the dissonance and anger, to reject the more familiar sounds in order to free it all up again. So the instrumentation is very different, led by piano and voice, and the overall sound is lush yet intimate. Overall it's far more reflective of me, both as a person and the sort of music I actually listen to."

" It felt right, and when that happens, you just go with it," says James Johnston of his decision, well into a third decade as frontman of Gallon Drunk, to record The Starless Room, his unexpectedly sumptuous, long-awaited, debut solo album. Over eight albums, Gallon Drunk have carved out a reputation as a savage live act whose work has increasingly revealed a bold sophistication, growing from the psychotic fury of 1991's You, The Night… And The Music up to 2014's epic The Soul Of The Hour. A solo album by their co-founder, though? That had somehow never come to pass. Especially one this lavish.

"It wasn't something I'd really considered before," Johnston admits, and even now he appears a little startled by the turn events have taken. "But that's where the writing was going. I've always poured all my ideas into Gallon Drunk, but we'd done two great records in fairly quick succession, and I really didn't want to repeat myself, so I was writing in a different way, one that didn't feel like it would work as Gallon Drunk. The moment the decision was made to go ahead with a solo album it freed a lot of things up for me, letting it go somewhere different without any constraints or expectations."

The Starless Room is distinguished by its grandeur and romance as much as its refreshing musical approach.

As well as playing with Gallon Drunk, Johnston has spent considerable time working with others: a mid 90s spell as a touring guitarist in The Bad Seeds led to a full role in Nick Cave's band between 2003 and 2008, and he's performed regularly with other iconic acts, including Lydia Lunch, Faust, and, currently, PJ Harvey, on whose The Hope Six Demolition Project Johnston appears.

Given the licentious nature of much of his previous work, that this newly mature, refined sound is indicative of Johnston's character may be unforeseen. His influences, however - "Big Star's Third, John Cale's 70s albums, Lee Hazlewood, Nina Simone, that sort of thing" - remain much as they were, if arguably employed with a new, more thoughtful perspective. Furthermore, his considered approach is indicative of a man with a musical education, both formal and informal.

Suitably, it's the title track that encapsulates the romantic sweep of the record best, with its star at his most intense and Sebastian Hoffman's string arrangements at their most ambitious. For Johnston, however, the greatest pleasure of all is a simple one: the songs' slow tempos, "something I adore, like a lot of the Isaac Hayes or Ray Charles albums that I love. It almost feels like I'm listening to someone else's record." But it's not. It's James Johnston's debut solo album, The Starless Room. Like he said, it feels just right.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Heartfelt anthems ruminating on life and love, existence and everything inbetween. Slow string swells and bombastic build-ups fade into mournful piano territory, all driven along by Johnston's heartfelt crooning vocal delivery. Sensitive soaring rock equally at home in the front room or belting out over a stadium PA.

TRACK LISTING

1. I'd Give You Anything
2. St. Martha's
3. Starless Room
4. Cold Morning Light
5. Dark Water
6. Frozen Time
7. Heart And Soul
8. The Light Of Love
9. Let It Fall
10. When The Wolf Calls