Zechs Marquise
Getting Paid

Char Aznable gave Amuro Ray a hard time. Much more style, and even the big robot he piloted was way cooler (I used to watch those cursed VHS tapes that were handed down to me by I don’t remember who, thinking "the villain is always the coolest, come on, scatter the wreckage of that useless white trash can in space").

Then time passed, and so did he. But his legacy remains. Revolutionary ideas, the speed of the craft, the style. All the way down to one of his recent reincarnations: Zechs Marquise.

A review on Gundam? Certainly not. But the proper introduction to the band of the younger brothers Omar Rodriguez-Lopez who, in this specific case, takes on the role of the precursor Char who paves the way for his "bastard" godchildren here on the second disc, already strong enough to give a beating to quite a few ears. In the grooves of this work from the Family, we find Marcel and Manfred handling drums, keyboards, synth, and bass of this deadly creature, alongside Matthew Wilkson and Marcos Smith with their acrobatic guitars. But here everything is damn acrobatic, a Cirque du Soleil of progression.

To me, this "Getting Paid" seems to have been born from a luminous cell of that "De-Loused In Comatorium" that once was. But while in Mars Volta the situation was "King Crimson munching on a jazz-flavored Abraxas pill," here I find the opposite path. The Latin-progressive contamination is prominent, biting and so evident that one cannot assert otherwise. It stands out in the sky of a desert with colors skewed by excessive mescalito use, as if it were an endless desert session where they dance to an infinite amount of echoes without altering any of these good guys' skills. I hear guitar riffs coming from Eastern Europe that evoke certain circus ailments of the Sleepytime Gorilla Museum (listen to the title track to believe it), the devastating tarry harmonizations of math, time distortions that leave you dazzled, an excessive use of electronics that is never out of place despite being everywhere, drum rhythms akin to a train that makes you feel like there's a chimera mixing Parliament and King Crimson (imagine Brailey and Mastellotto arm in arm and on acid for hours) both on "Lock Jaw Night Vision" and on "Everlasting Beacon Of Light" with its tribalfunkishmad voices. The guitars continuously interlock and exchange, and the spirit of David Fiuczynski and his crazy Jazz Punk appear a bit everywhere, and "Guajira" has a moment of devastating tension that resolves into a latin electro-mystical delirium that leaves you as if a big robot (that comes from El Paso and not Tokyo) had passed over your head.

The family is an important value. But only if it's full of crazies like this.