Rock history contains reams of bands that blew apart just as they blew up — and At the Drive-In might be the most extreme example.
Their guitarist, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, may have decried the mix of 2000's Relationship of Command as "passive, plastic… it's the one record I still to this day cannot listen to." But he was doing it a disservice, perhaps by being too close to the object: every scream and arcane lyric and rhythmic left turn adds up to an album of whiplash impact.
But maybe he had a point, in that the final At the Drive-In record — almost by necessity — couldn't capture the napalm of the band live. Just watch them tear into "Arcarsenal" or "One Armed Scissor" or "Cosmonaut" back then — their bodies seem to never touch the ground.
One world tour later, At the Drive-In announced they were taking an "indefinite hiatus"; Rodríguez-López cited "a non-stop six-year cycle of record/tour/record/tour," adding that the group needed "time to rest up and re-evaluate."
That break would last for an entire decade, and couldn't solely be chalked up to exhaustion. "We just have to iron out a lot of personal things," vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala said in 2009 — more than a year before At the Drive-In would officially announce their reunion.
Given how hard-partying, high-flying and hard-everything At the Drive-In were — and how relationships had frayed in the wake of their implosion — Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López could have hit a wall. Instead, they created music that married the post-hardcore band's intensity to more cerebral, complex and challenging ends.
Thus, the very same year At the Drive-In ran aground, the Mars Volta were born. After a promising 2002 EP, Tremulant, they fully flowered with 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium.
On June 24, the Rick Rubin-assisted album turned 20. Although there have been a multitude of twists and turns in the band's career since — including a recent return after a decade off — it remains one of their most beloved albums, if not the most beloved.\
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For one, De-Loused in the Comatorium featured one of the lineup-fluid band's most powerful iterations: Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López, along with keyboardist Isaiah "Ikey" Owens, bassist Flea, drummer Jon Theodore, and effects whiz Jeremy Ward. MVP moments from all these accompanists are abundant, but Flea has a particularly revealing showing; his tense, understated playing is vastly divergent from his slap-saturated Red Hot Chili Peppers parts.
Compositionally, highlights like "Iniertiatic ESP," "Drunkship of Lanterns" and "Cicatriz ESP" stretch far beyond the bounds of post-hardcore. Bixler-Zavala pivoted from belting and screaming, instead employing his bracing, incisive and sweet tenor. Despite their alien, unpredictable and teeming natures, the tracks on De-Loused were more than ever, songs rather than sonic assaults.
De-Loused in the Comatorium also marked Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López's first capital-c concept record. It follows the protagonist, Cerpin Taxt — namechecked in the closer, "Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt" — through a phantasmagorical world after he overdoses on morphine and rat poison.
This narrative thread pulls along the listener from beginning to end — even if they may never know what a "boxcar cadaver," "carpal jets" or a "cartweel of scratches" is.
The story also had tragic and unintentional prescience: Ward died in 2003 — a month before De-Loused was released — of a heroin overdose. (Owens, too, passed — in 2014, from a heart attack while on tour with Jack White in Mexico.)
De-Loused was met with critical acclaim; Yahoo! Music declared it's "not an album to listen to casually. It insists on taking over your life for an hour, demands a level of concentration rare in rock, amply repays multiple plays."
Clearly, itss aesthetic, compositions and narrative showed that Bixler-Zavala and Rodríguez-López had a lot to say post-At the Drive-In. Better yet, it was just the beginning of a potent new chapter for the artistic partners.
The manic ambition of 2005's Frances the Mute and 2006's Amputechture; the spiritistic meltdown of 2008's The Bedlam in Goliath, their turns toward accessibility with 2009's Octahedron, 2012's Noctourniquet, and 2022's self-titled reunion album — all of it was made possible by De-Loused in the Comatorium.
"Past present and future tense/ Clipside of the pinkeye fountain," Bixler-Zavala announced through his nasal midrange in the unforgettable "Inertiatic E.S.P."
And De-Loused in the Comatorium felt Janus-like in that regard — their past settled, their present known, their future deliciously strange and boundless.