Another Comeback in a Different Trail OR A Different Kind of Still Going Then OR Second Bananas Going Steady: The Buzzcocks

So far in this special Rocktober Review, we’ve covered a number of releases by long-time acts who have made musical choices expected, unexpected, and unnoticeable¹. Now it’s time for an album whose very existence causes all sorts of questions about band continuity, whether there’s merit in quitting, and, you know, finally getting a chance in the spotlight after years of sharing it. 

¹ respectively

That’s right, it’s time to talk about the Buzzcocks. 

Steve Diggle, the longest-tenured Buzzcock, has decided to keep the band rolling in the wake of the death of Pete Shelley, the band’s founding guitarist/songwriter, and their longest-serving singer. Whether this is a good idea is, I suppose, in the eye of the beholder, but the fact of a new Buzzcocks record’s existence, four years after Pete Shelley’s death, is certainly eyebrow-raising. 

Formed at the very advent of punk rock, based out of Manchester, The Buzzcock’s initial run is the stuff that rock music dreams are made of. Founding a record label to release their initial release, a short EP that represents the very brief time that future Magazine leader Howard Devoto was the singer, they led the way for many other British bands to do the same. By actively getting the Sex Pistols to play Manchester, they established another punk rock foothold, and, almost as a side note, they made some of the best rock music ever to be made by humans. 

Spiral Scratch (the aforementioned record with Howard Devoto) is probably the least of their first set of records – it’s an EP, it’s over quickly, Martin Hannett produced it but hasn’t figured out what he’s doing yet, and time has not been kind to it. It still manages a couple of things worthy of note. One is Howard Devoto himself, who was an incredible frontman, but who also, if the lyrics to “Boredom” are to be believed, was pretty much done with punk rock in 1976, when the song was written. The other is, of course, the guitar solo to “Boredom,” which, if you haven’t listened to it recently, you should treat yourself to. It’s the best guitar solo ever recorded.

Their first full-length album then, was Another Music From a Different Kitchen, and is the band in full flower, settled into the lineup that would carry them through to their initial breakup. There’s not a bad song on the record, and it’s germane to our purposes here to note that Steve Diggle wrote the best song on it, “Fast Cars”. A scant few months later, they released the follow-up, Love Bites, which actually charted fairly well, and features “Nostalgia”², which is great, and the rare but majestic Buzzcocks instrumental, which is interesting, but not necessary. The third record, A Different Kind of Tension, shows the band mostly coming to a halt, three albums, an EP and some singles into it. It’s a great record, and establishes The Buzzcocks’ original run as one of the all-time greats. And none of those are the best Buzzcocks record. 

² which, weirdly, is one of the more-covered Buzzcocks songs

Talking about the Buzzcocks’ original run and, as a matter of course here, talking about their legacy, means stopping to take a moment to acknowledge Singles Going Steady. Released originally by IRS Records, SGS is, as the title implies, a collection of the A- and B-Sides of their eight singles. It is, therefore, a collection of sixteen of the best songs any rock band, punk or otherwise, has ever had to offer the world. If there were justice in the world, this would dethrone Hotel California³ as the biggest-selling record ever. 

³ or Thriller, whichever is on top currently

It was, at the time of its release, the only Buzzcocks record available in America, as it was meant to introduce the band to America. The band, instead, broke up. During this break up, Diggle formed the dreadful Flag of Convenience with the Buzzcocks’ non-Pete Shelley guitar player, John Maher. They would also tour as Buzzcocks FOC, which seems shitty, and was not met with much approval. Then, after Shelley also wandered afield in the world of synth music, they reunited. 

The Buzzcocks were trailblazers of punk rock, writing pop songs then playing them like a punk band, keeping melody and normal human emotions intact while not failing to appeal to people who wanted things loud and fast. They had also been excellent players, which was a noteworthy thing in the scorched-earth time of British Punk. Their final innovations, on the other hand, were somewhat more disappointing. Firstly, they became one of the first punk bands to create more material post-reunion than they did pre-reunion⁴, and their post-reunion material felt like it owed  a lot more to the bands that the Buzzcocks had influenced than the Buzzcocks themselves. 

⁴ they reunited in the early nineties, which was somewhat before the seemingly eternal cycle of reunion gravy-train riding that we’re in now

Their first reunion album, Trade Test, can sort of be seen as a warm-up; the subsequent albums are better, but basically in the same line. I’ve always sort of presumed that touring⁵ made the band better enough that All Set is not actively bad to listen to. If you get ahold of the Japanese version, now made easier thanks to The Internet, you can even hear Diggle’s songs on it, most of which were left off due to an error somewhere along the production way. They’re pretty good. The album is better for them. 

⁵ they did, to their credit, tour like madmen

Then IRS records folded up, Steve Diggle largely abandoned the guitar, Pete Shelley remembered that a lot of his non-Buzzcocks material had been pretty electronics-heavy, and the result was Modern, in which the reunion lineup of The Buzzcocks does their best to sound like Magazine. It’s ill-advised, and, worst of all, uninteresting. Everyone didn’t need to leave and sound like Magazine, Howard Devoto had already done that⁶. Devoto co-wrote a couple of Buzzcocks songs on the next-one, their self-titled record, which I’ve always assumed was self-titled to remind people that this was, in some meaningful sense, still the same band. It probably wasn’t a reminder that anyone needed – it’s wildly uneven, although “Stars,” one of the songs that Howard Devoto co-wrote, is genuinely very good. They did, this time, remember to keep Steve Diggle’s songs on there. They’re fine. 

⁶ in fact, without breaking up the band, Shelley and Devoto reconnected for the best record in the Buzzcocks family of products to come out during this period, the excellent Buzzkunst.

Then the band seems to lose their identity entirely. Flat-Pack Philosophy is one of the sleepier Buzzcocks records, and the final record to be made with their post-reunion lineup. Diggle wrote fully half the songs, but I don’t think the record is his fault. Half the rhythm section left before they played the Warped Tour (and let that stand as a monument to where the band was at this time), and the other half when they got home. By the time they got around to making The Way, eight years later⁷, I was pretty well out of the loop for all things ‘cocks, and didn’t ever listen to it until I started writing this. Diggle also wrote half the songs for that one, and, to his credit, there is no marked difference in quality between his and Shelley’s. What that level of quality may be I leave as an exercise for the listener⁸. 

⁷ and, in fact, during the tenure of this website
⁸ or, if you read the footnotes, you can know: it’s bad. 

In 2018, Pete Shelley died, and that was very sad. After a period of time, Diggle announced that the Buzzcocks would not, in fact, be packing it in, and that he was going to get some new Buzzcocks and keep the ball rolling. In 2020, he made good on his threat, and a new single appeared (which wasn’t very good), followed by an attendant EP (that wasn’t very good), and now, here, a record.

I suppose there’s no points for guess that it isn’t very good. There’s no real way to get around it. There is a sort of sound that comes with these “rock dudes get together and do it again” records, especially when there’s no real “again” to the proceedings⁹. It’s plagued records by much better bands, and it’s here. I’m not quite sure how to define it, except to say that it feels a lot less like a dude making the record he wants to make than like someone putting on a costume to look the way they used to look. 

⁹ Diggle is the only person left who was in any incarnation of the band prior to The Way. 

The music is devoid of the experimentation – or at least lack of sameness – of even the very latest Buzzcocks records, and has, basically, completed the band’s coasting into forgettable nothingness. “Nothingless World” almost works, despite a guitar riff that suggests that he’d also like to tell me what he likes about me. “Just Got to Let it Go” has kind of a cool piano part. “Can You Hear Tomorrow” has a pretty good riff. The rest of it just sort of…happens, with the exception of “Experimental Farm,” whose lyrics veer slightly from Diggle’s standard mode¹⁰ to imply that Mr. Diggle has got some extremely dodgy political beliefs¹¹, although he doesn’t espouse them outright, so it’s entirely possible that he hasn’t got any. 

¹⁰ which is banal and cliché-filled nearly to the point of humor
¹¹ I will say here that one of the things that has always kept me out of camp Diggle is his joyful tendency to insist that Pete Shelley was not the bisexual man he claimed to be, but rather had been a confused kid. Fuck off, Diggle. 

It all sorts of makes the central question here – whether this should be happening at all – somewhat murky. In the best version of the question, a public that has a relationship to a unit of human beings who made art is asking what that relationship requires. In the platonic, no-details version of the question, as in actual real life, there’s no way to stop Steve Diggle from doing whatever he wants, under whatever name that he’d like. It’s the way that it goes. The question of whether he should have seems, to me, to sort of include its own retribution: by continuing the Buzzcocks name, he’s definitely inviting annoyance and negative criticism galore, which would have been obviated had he just called this The Steve Diggle Exprience or some shit. Hell, it’s got as many members in common as Flag of Convenience, the answer was staring him in the face. He could’ve gotten a band together that used to pretend to be the Buzzcocks anyway. 

But that’s how it is for everybody¹² – even bands that don’t break up have to navigate the waters of people either not wanting them to do what they’re doing, or wanting them to only ever do what they’re doing, forever. There’s no obviously correct answer, because there isn’t a right or wrong way to be an artist. 

¹² minus the Flag of Convenience stuff which, thankfully, is limited to Steve Diggle

When I started this piece, I thought I was going to get down to the brass tacks of figuring out what someone owed an audience, or a former bandmate, or whatever, but I’m brought up against the fact that those are, generally, artistic concerns, and for this kind of second-reunion, post-death version of a band, those aren’t the conditions that govern their existence. I made a joke a couple of paragraphs ago about reviving Flag of Convenience, but the answer to why he didn’t do so is plain: there’s no money in it. 

I suppose there is a world in which Steve Diggle is delusional enough to believe that this set of nothing-special songs is somehow a valuable and necessary part of The Buzzcocks body of work¹³, and maybe that’s this word, but I don’t believe that it is. I think, in times uncertain, and circumstances that are getting bleaker seemingly by the hour, Steve Diggle figured out how to be more financially secure, and did so with this business. I don’t fault him, and I don’t particularly care – I never have to think about this album again after I write this, and I probably won’t. He’s done no harm to “Fast Cars” or “Autonomy,” let alone any of the songs he didn’t write, and if he gets what he wants out of this, then fine. 

¹³ a body of work that hasn’t been meaningfully added to in more but the most marginal sense since 1979

But, you know, it’s bad and he probably shouldn’t have, because I can’t imagine it’s going to have done him, or the band he insists is his, any favors. 

Ah, well. 

Still Going Then?: Sparta

The existence of a new Sparta album, a mere matter of days after a new Mars Volta album, is probably a coincidence¹, but, even as such, it’s too juicy to just walk by and not try on a little comparison. 

¹ about which, perhaps, you may see below

Sparta, as previously mentioned in both of the other At the Drive-In themed pieces² is the other band that formed out of the head of At the Drive-In. The band has been similarly issue-plagued, although in Sparta’s case it’s less because of having a wildly mercurial singer as much as having a singer/creative center who has an unfortunate tendency to not be able to continue being in his band anymore (only occasionally in the middle of a tour). Most of that is outlined in the ATDI post in FN2, but the essential bit of the information is: Jeff Ward, I’m assuming, requires fairly specific circumstances in order to perform in any band, even if the band is solely his own. 

² here and here

When At the Drive-In broke up, Ward wasted no time in regrouping most of the non Bixler-Zavala/Rodriguez-Lopez members and putting together a rock band. It became easy, then, for the non-Sparta-intersted listener³, to imagine that the Sparta members were responsible for the straight-ahead (and less interesting) rock aspects of At the Drive In, and tht the Mars Volta members were responsible for the twisty, experimental aspects. 

³ largely me, although I do like Wiretap Scars

Note that this might not, in fact, actually be true but, as the easiest assumption to make, it’s one that had some legs – it was pretty common through the fandoms, and the press, at the time, and it’s hard to escape, if not particularly interesting in and of itself. 

Sparta were first out of the gate after the breakup, releasing their EP Austere a year after At the Drive-In called it quits for the first time. It does not appear to be made up of leftover ATDI songs, at least according to the information available to me from here, but it sure sounds like it is.

Wiretap Scars gets it a little more right – it sounds like the work of a band, certainly, and, at that point, it more-or-less was: the lineup was pretty stable for the initial, most-productive run of records. Wiretap Scars had the closest thing the band had to a real hit in “Cut Your Ribbon,” which also begins Sparta’s trend of putting the best song of the album first (a thing they continue to do even here at the end of 2022). If it still sounds a bit like stuff that ATDI didn’t play, it’s a little harder to fault this time out, since they are coming into what an optimistic listener in 2002 would hope to be their own sound. 

It turns out they weren’t moving toward much of anything. Porcelain, the second album, is basically the same thing, although they can be credited for writing some really math-y parts that made it a little more interesting than just a retread. Porcelain also has a lyrical focus specifically on people dying, and moving on therefrom, but Jim Ward was vehement about the lyrics having nothing to do with the death of his cousin, Jeremy Ward. 

This is, the reader is meant to assume, some more evidence that in the race to be the pettiest ex-member of At the Drive-In, and, in fact, something of a trump card: Ward couldn’t possibly have been writing about his own cousin, not because the Mars Volta did so⁴, but because he couldn’t’ find the words and no, these were songs about a totally different, unrelated death, so there. 

⁴ Jeremy Ward having been responsible, in one way or another, for much of the subject matter of the lyrics of the first three MV records

It’s a miracle that any of these people ever got it together to do anything at all. 

They made a live record (which I’ve never heard⁵), and that about wrapped it up for the original lineup of Sparta. The guy from Engine Down⁶ joined as the guitar player and, several years after Porcelain, they made the less-dense, less-upbeat Threes (the title proving that numerological hokum was not limited to the Mars Volta end of At the Drive-In). Threes didn’t have much going for it – nobody’s heart sounds in it, and the musical flourishes that could otherwise have been interesting are mostly bogged down in just how samey it is, although there’s still a lot of technical aspects to the playing that seemed to make people happy. 

⁴ it’s out of print and not on streaming services, although it was released via Mountain Dew records, which is pretty funny
⁵ who were very good

Then the band drifted apart, or coasted to a stop, or whatever metaphor you want here. Ward moved into the alt-country space⁶ with the not-very-good Sleepercar, which made two records over the course of several years and may not have been a “band” as such. 

⁶ then at more-or-less the tail-end of its boomlet – it was still around, somewhat, but wasn’t as popular as it had been a couple of years before. 

Then there was a false start, when the band got back together very briefly, broke up again, and then lay dormant for awhile, although at least this time Ward seemed to believe that the band would, in fact, be back. 

They didn’t get back together before the unlikely reunion of At the Drive-In, but immediately upon leaving that band (right before their tour), Ward decided to revive Sparta, who bopped around for a few years before putting out their fourth record, Trust the River. Now, I almost wrote about this album at the time, as a Comeback Trail post, but didn’t because, well, there just isn’t that much to say about it. It’s fine, but it also establishes that, whatever the thing that identifies Sparta in the head of Jeff Ward, it isn’t anything that works for me. There was, once again, some fine playing, and some details that were interesting, and people that still listen to Sparta seem happy with it. 

And then, of course, 2020 happened⁷, and all momentum the band may have created for themselves sort of slid down the drain. It’s hard to know, of course, how much momentum there would actually have been in any event – it’s always hard with Ward to know what was going to have happened, and what he was going to cancel – but it’s admirable, in any event, that he’s come back out with a new record only a couple of years later. Especially when you consider that Jim Ward’s solo album, released a year or so ago, really looked, to me, a person with an extremely casual relationship with the work of Jim Ward, to be the end of this incarnation of Sparta. 

⁷ which is, in fact, not Sparta’s fault. 

Information about the record itself is sparse⁸, although it seems like it was attended normally – there was the announcement of its existence with a couple of advance singles, a normal amount of interviews and such, and the album, but my usual habit when I do these things of reading all of the press that exists about an album that I’m writing about comes up with very little – which is fine. It means there isn’t a tonne to go off of, and that whatever road Sparta are traveling down, they are doing so for whatever fans exist. Presumably. 

⁸ a lesser writer would say it’s…Spartan but, of course, I am a very fine wordsmith and would never do that to any of you. 

So how are those fans served by this one? I have no idea. It was made by Ward with Matt Miller, with a sort of revolving cast of other musicians, including 50% or so of Thursday⁹. Ward has said that the record was made over the course of the pandemic, that the whole thing was assembled via email (“never another person in the room with me”), with a break in the middle for him to make the aforementioned solo record. 

⁹ another band that made an album that I liked a great deal in the early aughts and that has, like Sparta, somehow continued along despite, you know, not being any good anymore. 

The result, then, sounds basically like someone gluing together an album out of parts, which were made by people who, largely, were invested in one small portion of the whole, and stuck together by someone whose impulses are largely proggy and technically-oriented. Which is to say: it largely fails as a rock record, and isn’t interesting enough as a studio document to get over in that way. 

I usually segue into this by pointing out that any given album has high points. It’s true, there are high points. Every Sparta album is front-loaded, and in the first few songs there are a couple of killer choruses (“It Goes” has very little else going for it, “Carry On” is more-or-less saved by its chorus, despite some terrible vocals), and some of the loud parts are pretty good, but mostly there just isn’t anything to suggest that there’s a creative force at work, here, rather than just a lifer who decided to make some new songs. 

The thing that brought this record to this space, in fact, is its humorous juxtaposition with the new Mars Volta record. It’s perhaps unsurprising¹⁰ that the Sparta record is less objectionable: there isn’t anything to object to. 

¹⁰ at least if you read this space regularly for the non-book posts 
¹¹ I am reluctant to say “the band’s sound” because there is not, in fact, a band on this record

I suppose it shows what the real divide was, in the post-ATDI careers of its members: The Mars Volta made a terrible record because they were interested in pushing their sound toward whatever territory they could make it fit into, and Sparta made a deeply unobjectionable (and unmemorable) record because…they don’t really have much of a sound to push anywhere. Failure is worse than consistency, but the impulse that drove MV to failure is way more interesting than the impulse that drove Sparta to make another record I’ll probably enver think about.

The record is fine. If you’re into what it is that Sparta is doing, I bet you’ll be all set. I can’t imagine how that comes to happen, but I acknowledge that people like all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. It’s deeply unobjectionable, appears to set its sights no further than merely existing, and maybe the songs will sound better on tour. I don’t know, I won’t be there. 

The Comeback Trail: The Mars Volta

So the theme this Rocktober has been somewhat backward-facing: we’ve had Ozzy facing his mortality, Muse facing not wanting to put all their best songs together because then everyone will know they’re bad, and now, a sequel of sorts: The Mars Volta are back together, and have made another album.

So, a handful of years ago, At the Drive-In reunited, put out a pretty-bad album, and got a mention in this space. Since this band continues on from that one, there will be some overlap. At the Drive-In for any of several reasons¹ flew apart, and one of the hunks that held together in the explosion was the musical partnership of the mercurial, drug-happy, generally-emotionally-unpredictable singer/lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and the relatively level-headed, drug-happy, prolific guitarist/songwriter Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.

¹ several of the members continue to have wildly incompatible methods of being dysfunctional, plus all the normal reasons that a band breaks up after getting close to fame

Shortly after the dissolution of ATDI, the existence of The Mars Volta was announced, with their 

debut EP, Tremulent, emerging in early 2002. The EP itself is notable primarily for two things: one is it was, until this very year, the only recordings which featured the original bassist, industry-lifer Eva Gardner, and also for the wildly-vituperative “Concertina,” in which Cedric Bixler Zavala unleashes vitriol on a former member of At the Drive-In, blaming him for the suicide of one of Zavala’s friends. If you’ve read the previous piece on ATDI (or, indeed, just about anything about Zavala), then you know that having hostile, publicly-aired² relationships with former bandmates is kind of his thing.  If you didn’t, understand that it’s basically the underlying theme of his entire career. 

² I presume they are also drug-fueled, most of Zavala’s public interactions are, but, you know, can’t say it for sure. 

Also, it’s worth noting that my bemusement at the way that Cedric Bixler-Zavala chooses to interact with the public, etc, has absolutely nothing to do with my relationship to his band, whom, at this point in the narrative, I love very much, and whom I will never actually stop being a fan of. 

The EP was followed fairly shortly by their Rick-Rubin-produced³ debut album, De-Loused in the Comatorium coming out sometime in 2003. Flea played bass, since Eva Anderson had at this point left the fold, and John Frusciante played guitar on a song. They went on tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, at which point the story contains its first tragedy, as the co-lyricist noise guy⁴, Jeremy Ward, died of a drug overdose. Ward⁵ had co-written the short story that De-Loused’s lyrics were based on, and the incident clearly left its mark on the way the band moved forward, not least in that it got the band to stop using opiates recreationally. 

³ there is a real Red Hot Chili Peppers through-line to the arc of the Mars Volta, and I’m not sure if the Rick Rubin connection is a cause or an effect.
⁴ he’s credited as the sound manipulator, but, you know. Noise guy. 
⁵ I’ve often wondered if Bixler-Zavala was just superstitious about starting a band without a guy named “Ward” in the lineup. 

Ward did also, sort of, obliquely⁶ contributed to the band’s second (and best) album, Frances the Mute, if only by having been a repo man who found a diary in a car that contributed to the lyrics. On Frances, the band filled out and basically settled into what appeared to be a groove, and even had something of a radio hit in the form of “The Widow,” a song which, if you chop the several minutes of noise-jam off the end of it, is about as catchy as anything the band would write for awhile. In the narrative of the band’s career, we can call its relative-accessibility foreshadowing. 

⁶ everything in the Mars Volta is done obliquely

The third studio album⁷, Amputechture, took the creative swerve of largely keeping Rodriguez-Lopez’s hands off the guitars – he decided to teach his guitar parts to John Frusciante⁸ and only play the guitar solos, and the parts where the guitars needed doubling. At this point they bring in Paul Hinojos, who had been At the Drive-In’s bass player (presumably, he got over Bixler-Zavala’s public berating)⁹ as the new Noise Guy. This is also the last record with their incredible original drummer, Jon Theodore.

⁷ there’s a live album in between – Scabdates – which I don’t have much to say about, but which is very good
⁸ if you’re thinking this is a strange partnership, I assure you it made perfect sense at the time, and still does: if you’re unfamiliar with John Frusciante’s solo albums, I recommend that you treat yourself to them – they’re deeply unlike anything he’s doing with the Chili Peppers, and are full of incredible, oddball guitar playing that does, among other things, make him a perfect fit for MV. 
⁹ although he also played guitar in Sparta, so maybe he was just super-easy to get along with

It makes sense, presented quickly and directly like that, that this is where the major wobbles in the band start to appear (although I can’t claim to have noticed it at the time). Their albums get less-consistent from here, as do the band’s lineups. The Bedlam in Goliath is pretty good, although it can be a little hard to get past that the songs are inspired by an experience of great import with a Ouija board, spooking the band into a new creative direction, and adding a frisson of silliness to the project. I mean, really, guys. I’m comfortable blaming the drugs for this one. 

John Frusciante came back for Octahedron, and then left forever, as did Ikey Owens (the second former member of the band to die tragically young) and, spectacularly, and onstage, their second drummer. There were, unsurprisingly, bitter, public recriminations between Bixler-Zavala and the drummer, Thomas Pridgen. It really derailed what they were calling their pop album at the time¹⁰. I’m not sure if that one holds up to the distinction, but it is markedly different, and was, at the time, a surprising swerve. If Bedlam was the point at which my fandom became considerably less enthusiastic, at this point it downshifted into, basically, a sort of “enthusiastic curiosity,” with very little actual feeling left – I was pretty sure wherever MV was going, I wasn’t going to be going with them for very long. 

¹⁰ this is some more of that foreshadowing I was talking about earlier

Turns out there wasn’t very long in any event. 

Their sixth album, Noctourniquet, had very few of the usual suspects. It started with a fight that meant Bixler-Zavala took forever to write lyrics, and everyone had to wait forever for it. Then, amid bitter, presumably drug-fuelled recriminations, Bixler-Zavala posted his lack of further involvement to social media, placing the blame squarely on Rodriguez-Lopez¹¹, and assuring everyone that no really, the band was done forever. 

¹¹ for his part, this is the one tantrum he has shown contrition about, and he seems to genuinely wish it would have gone differently

There was a brief lull, a caesura during which Rodriguez-Lopez made seventeen billion solo albums, and Bixler-Zavala dealt with, well, the Church of Scientology. 

I’m not going to spend too much time on it. Bixler-Zavala’s time interacting with the church seems to be pretty terrible, and his wife is one of the women currently suing Danny Masterson, so there’s really nothing to make light of there¹². It does, however, contribute to the fracturing of the relationship, and is also such a prominent part of the story both of this album and of the last ten or so years of Bixler-Zavala’s life, that it would be weird not to have it anywhere. 

¹² although, you know, fuck the Church of Scientology, specifically and in general, but that’s rather beside the point

They mended their fences, and began and ended the not-very-good Antemasque¹³, and then reunited their original partnership, At the Drive-In, which you read about if you clicked the link way back at the beginning (or if you’ve been reading along this whole time). At the Drive-In managed to end without any major public shouting matches, which is a sign of either maturity or a lack of investment. Either is fine. 

¹³ who I spent so little time with, and whose material is so thin, that if they get back together I bet they won’t even get a Comeback Trail post.

Then Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez quietly reopened the door to the Mars Volta, playing some secret shows, rehearsing, and eventually telling the world that this was going to be a different situation, and that this time, for really real this time, they were going to make a pop record.

Reader, for whatever else may have gone on, for all that their public statements are whatever they are, they did, in fact, make a pop record this time. They self-titled it to “give themselves a clean slate”, which I suppose would be useful if people were expecting proggy-ass freakouts and got, well, this. 

They filled the press around the album with the general sort of thing one would expect from a combative contrarian – claiming that it was the follow-up to a threat in the Quietus link above, generally telling anyone who would listen to them that if people didn’t like it they didn’t get it, the sort of thing that happens all the time when a band is doing something different. 

And, look, I’m glad these dudes – maybe even especially these dudes – are following whatever muse they’ve caught down whatever roads it’s leading them down. The music they’ve made that has meant a lot to me has been the result of their partnership being unexpected and often stubbornly un-pleasing. Great work, couldn’t ask for more, etc. 

This record is not for me. 

They have successfully taken the form of a rock-inflected pop band that most of the music just sort of washes over me in a “what if Dungen and Maroon 5 met a cumbia band”¹⁴ sort of way. I do, however, like both prog rock and pop music, as extensively documented in this very space, and am confident saying that, say, “No Case Gain” is terrible. So are “Vigil,” “Que Digos de Maldiga Mi Corazon” (those two songs are also consecutive on the album, which creates a veritable landmine) and “The Requisitio”, which also features a rarity in the MV catalog: clunky, over-simple lyrics. 

¹⁴ it’s worth pointing out that this point that both constant members, and especially Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, whose brother is one of their drummers, have been constant about the influence of the Latin music of their roots, and that I, an idiot, do not have a very wide grounding in such matters, and so am going to back off talking about it except here, where the point is basically the notion that it’s present, and audible even to a person who doesn’t have a high degree of knowledge of the source material.  

Most of the rest of it merely washes over, with occasional high points, such as they are. “Collapsible Shoulders” would be a good song if it had a different chorus. “Palm Full of Crux” sounds more like Pink Floyd than any other band, which is a net bonus for this particular record. “Blank Condolences” is at least kind of relaxing. I’ll even go so far as to say that “Equus 3” is kind of what I had hoped all of this pop-record business was going for – it actually does sound like MV, for one thing, not like the same band doing an impression of another band, but it’s also the only unreservedly good song on the record. 

So, at this point, it’s difficult to answer the question of the CT posts, namely: is this a worthwhile comeback? It requires some fairly careful definition, if I’m being honest. I’m always happy when Cedric and Omar are making records together. The last few outings have been pretty disappointing, but that’s the way of things – people grow in irrevocably different directions, and sometimes that means that bands that really worked at one point don’t anymore. So, in that sense, it’s not really successful – I don’t like it, I’m probably not going to think about it much, having already written about it, and that’s going to be that. 

But, you know, not everything is for me. Most things aren’t for me, really. Hardly anything is for me, and I respond to somewhat less than that. The reviews seem to indicate that MV fans are happy, and that’s good – if MV is your favorite band we probably have more in common than we don’t, and I’m happy for you that their Maroon 5 record works for you. For a purely theoretical “you” that I’ve just made up. But, really, I hope that if they continue to make records as the Mars Volta¹⁵ that they aren’t very much like this one. 

¹⁵ I will say that the question that immediately sprung to mind after listening to it for, I think, the second (maybe third) time was “why did they make this as an MV record, and not a new band with a different name?” They clearly have no compunctions about starting new bands. This seems like it would be a shoo-in for all that. 

Still Going Then?: Muse – Will of the People

Hey everybody! Last week I sort of back-door introduced a new feature, “Still Going Then?”, about veteran acts and their whereabouts. It’s been a long-brewing idea, and I’ve finally launched it out into the world, primarily because I finally have an ideal opening subject: Muse. Muse is the Muse of the Still Going Then? feature, if you will. 

I first became aware of Muse sometime in high school¹, heard their music, and didn’t mind them. I then got a bit older, and they continued to exist, and I didn’t mind them. Sometime in the mid-aughts, my long-suffering companion in music obsession saw them play live. I did not, but I’m told that it was fine, and I wouldn’t have minded it. All of this is, just about, the relationship I have with almost every band – fine, and not worth me spending more time on.

¹ I am not quite sure how it came to happen, but I have always linked them in my mind to the very different (and much better) Scottish band Idlewild, and, while I can’t remember why, that seems to indicate that I heard about them at about the same time

And then they started to have for-real radio hits, which, you know, is very rarely a good sign. And, indeed, it wasn’t, and the band converted themselves from a band who made music I didn’t mind to a band that made terrible music that actually annoyed me. They were, graded on the curve of their rough radio contemporaries², fine, mostly – it was bad and I didn’t want to listen to it, but it was often better than the music it was sandwiched between. And then things just sort of continued on that way. Muse would go on to be nominated for awards, occasionally, which I would write about here, and would hear their music under those circumstances where, generally, I didn’t mind it, while also still thinking it was bad. 

² that is to say, the people who had radio hits at the same time, many of whom were considerably younger than Muse, rather than by their actual contemporaries, because by this point I wasn’t considering them in that light

In essence, Muse converted my “I don’t mind” from the thing you’d say when you have to ride a roller coaster by yourself to the “I don’t mind” you say when you have to ride a roller coaster with a stranger. If you’re not seeing much difference, well, there isn’t much difference, but if I had to put a value to it, I’d say the first one is nanometers into a “plus” column, and the latter the same distance into the “minus.” 

It’s a fine distinction, I’m saying, but also it makes them perfect for this feature: I am largely bemused by the fact that (spoiler alert) they’ve managed to somehow lose the plot entirely, at least to a non-fan. 

And the non-fandom is, in essence, the thing that I think makes me most interested in the subject. Two things come to bear on it: the first is that I do not like the same things as other people. I don’t think I’m particularly unique in this aspect – I think anyone that spends a lot of time pursuing their own interests for their own reasons³ ends up noticing this. But, whatever else, I never got Muse’s thing, and, since it was outside my purview I didn’t pay much attention. I am also, as I have previously stated, a wildly terrible prognosticator, so I did not expect to continue to hearing about Muse at all, and thus didn’t notice how often I was until a little while ago. These two things come to bear on my surprise that a band who only moved the need on “I don’t mind it” in a nebulous and philosophical way, had ended up with a large, active and enthusiastic fanbase. This all, basically, happened without my noticing it. 

³ that is to say, anyone with an active interest in any given thing, as opposed to a passive “I’ll just throw on whatever” one. This isn’t a value distinction, it’s a level-of-interest distinction – I have the same relationship to movies that someone who just puts on Spotify’s “Good Times Dishes Washing” playlist does with music, for example, and the less we talk about my relationship with television, the less like a mutant I’ll feel. 

Not that that matters. What does matter here is: apparently their last album did not make people happy⁴, so this one had some weight on it. This really could, in fact, have been a Comeback Trail post, given that, rather than an inordinate time between releases, we instead have a letdown album that people are hopefully waiting for the recovery from. 

⁴ although even in this I have to run up against the fact that, really, Muse has tremendously-loyal and accepting fans, and they liked the last one. There are also plenty of them that liked Will of the People, which, spoiler alert, I am baffled by.

Their label, in a move that seems, to me at least, to be the sort of thing one would do if one were concerned with the longer-term commercial prospects of one of the few remaining rock bands that moves units in any label-appreciable number, asked them to release a greatest hits record, to which they responded that they were, instead, going to write an album that charted their development to this point – a sort of greatest hits without any of the actual hits. Obviously, that was good enough for the label, because it exists in the world. 

Of course, maybe the label was ameliorated by the additional windfall of the fact that, in addition to whatever revenue they can generate in the streaming, nobody-pays era, they can also count on the sure-to-be-enormous profits from this being the first album eligible to chart for an NFT release. They’re breaking ground here, by being not only being the first band eligible to chart for a No Fucking Thanks release, but also by the NFT release being the first chart-measured new format in years. If you aren’t as excited by this as the band would like you to be, perhaps you’d like to join me in snickering that all of this dumb bullshit is accomplished through fucking Limewire⁵, which would be a heck of an entry of its own, if it hadn’t been tied to this nonsense. 

⁵ Limewire! A name trusted in the fields of security, ethical righteousness and accurately-named songs! Limewire! Jesus christ, the mind reels. 

In any event, whatever propelled this thing across the finish line, it landed (as it were) in front of me⁶, and I have listened to it. The first issue this proposes is, perhaps, obvious: regardless of my opinion of the music itself⁷, there isn’t really a way in which this record is for me to begin with. I’m not a Muse fan (I don’t mind them, see), so in addition to it being difficult for me to engage with, there’s also a strange, referential quality to each of the songs representing a different era/leg/period of the band’s existence, and me not really knowing what that means, given that I would put the number of Muse songs I have any appreciable familiarity with at about 10 or so⁸. That’s not really enough to get what they’re doing. Nevertheless, I did what I could, and, since I couldn’t give it the benefit of a listen in the intended context, I would evaluate it based solely on what I was hearing.

⁶ although it must be said, because I’m not delusional or a grifter, I did not pay fakecoin for it, but instead streamed it on Spotify. No one got richer for my listen, is what I’m saying. 
⁷ which is forthcoming and, really, probably not surprising, especially if you read the footnotes
⁸ and, honestly, I would probably bet on the under if you offered me a line

Wimsatt and Beardsley would have been so proud. Or something. 

The music, then, taken on its own merits, divorced from any pre-existing idea of what it should sound like, separated from its context and consumed as though it was anything else, is terrible. I’m not sure where the misfire is, but I mind it, I mind it very much. When listening to it, it brought to mind not “this band is recording their own greatest hits but with new songs” but rather “someone wrote a jukebox musical about Muse and then lost the rights to any of Muse’s songs, resulting in this simulacrum garbage.” 

The first thing that the band wants you to know is that, in their grand dystopian sentiment⁹, they are deeply unafraid to mash up “The Beautiful People” and “Summertime Blues” and go from there. This is, at least, not quite like a jukebox musical – it’s more like a pastiche musical, where they start big with a statement of purpose that sounds like something you almost, but do not quite, know. They’ll get back to shameless rip-off territory with “Won’t Stand Down” (which sounds like AWOLNation’s execrable “Sail”, which at least had a funny video) and “Verona” (a nonspecific U2 soundalike with a guitar riff that sounds like what you’d get if you hit The Edge in the head with The Bat and expected him to write The Guitar Part), neither of which is memorable beyond the parts they yoinked from other bands. “Kill or Be Killed” is a fake metal song¹⁰ that sucks, and if “You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween” is not, in fact, the punchline to the joke, then I have no idea what else it even could be. If it’s self-aware, it’s merely dumb. If it’s intentionally (albeit obviously humorously) meant, then I’m not entirely sure what it could possibly represent beyond an inability to grasp the basic idea of “humor”, and carries the band well past the point of parody. 

⁹ apparently one of the many things I didn’t already know about Muse is that they have a bunch of songs about how the government is watching us and control our minds or whatever
¹⁰ actually, given that it’s a prog-rock band doing an imitation of a fake metal band, it’s like, a fake-fake-metal song? But the point is: they’re pretending to be a heavy band, and it’s bad

And that’s the stuff that’s worth mention – there’s a couple of ballads, and a couple of other songs that are just impossible for a non-fan¹¹ to get a handle on. I’m going to assume, given the number of reviews and things that are positive – and especially the ones that mention how much better it is than the album that came before it – that the fans are happy, and that’s probably good enough for them, and for Muse. 

¹¹ of Muse, of musicals, or of parody albums – I’m a fan of none of those things.

I’m not quite sure how this is all supposed to end, so I’ll merely mention that, in the end, the reason that Muse is still going is surprising (because I don’t hear anything to keep one listening to the band), and kind of baffling (because this is really bad), but also kind of self-evident (because I will agree that there aren’t a lot of people doing this particular version of radio-prog, even if this outing is Broadway-style radio-prog). I dunno, man. Muse. Who would’ve thought?

The Best Records of September 2022

Codeine – Dessau (a lost Codeine album is like a Christmas present for the world. Also, Immerwahr is nuts, this sounds great)

The Comet is Coming – Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam (it certainly helps mourn the loss of the Sons of Kemet)

Nils Frahm – Music for Animals (it seems counter-intuitive that when Nils abandoned the piano, he made what might actually be my favorite record)

Ka – Languish Arts/Woeful Studies (Ka’s current streak of fecundity is matched only by how consistent it is in quality-terms)

Alex G – God Save the Animals (All Alex G albums are very good, the end)