The Mars Volta
Live At Rainbow

LA RECENSIONE

After enduring the frost of a foggy Milanese day for over eight hours, squashed against a barrier of an obscure and shadowy venue and with a space-themed t-shirt in my backpack, I see a long-haired man stretching behind the backdrop of a stage barely fit to host, with some struggle, the famous little elephant-like Fiat 500.

A bespectacled àpeiron figure bounces in on his fat, taking a seat behind his keyboard; in his trailing shadowy aura strolls the bassist, an anonymous presence yet inherently rapturous; the drummer, a potential solitary confinement rat (one all for himself...) sits down with a wrinkled tank top (that doesn’t sit next to him due to good manners) on his stool, as uninterested as his tank top (not the stool, a composed person...). The Omar-Blixer-GlassesOfOmar trio makes their entrance on stage: (damn, they’re not even a meter away, those glasses... they’re terrifying, thick as the bottom of a bottle, but a bottle of those particularly bottle-like)... Does Omar have shoulders? No.

My nearsighted eyes glimpse an Ibanez, how can I not keep gazing at it raptured when those breathy bursts of fluidly fetal petals start to flow out of it? They echo the sighing, incessant lament of Blixer, a psychedelic fusion of keyboards, effects, bass, guitars, and drums, each song is a leap into a new swirling ataraxia: they stretch them by the hair, dragging them through new baptisms of watery torments... Freudian-Metaphysical iconicism.

They bolt back the elaborate nit-picking-comatory piece, veiling it with eclectic traces and iridescent with long, mistreated drapes: a virtuoso twirl between Fellini-like Turns and anatomical climbs among Escher’s Stairs and sweat that gushes over the sound...