Mars Volta: live

The Mars Volta *****

All Tomorrow’s Parties/HMV Forum

That relish-worthy anticipative murmur you get before the most legendary of shows never quite materialised on Monday night – as a gaggle of hooded teens and large-haired hipsters politely filed into the vast-ceilinged Forum, I imagine I could have easily released a pin from the balcony and heard it drop below, if only a stern faced woman in a day-glo orange jacket wasn’t scowling at me. In the ninety minutes my equally keen chaperone and I waited for the supportless TMV, the closest it got to rowdy was a couple of men asking me if the seats were allocated.

The Mars Volta arrived – Cedric with his massive afro and Omar with his guitar… and the others, with their filler status. Presided over by a massive illuminated Aztec-face-on-a-curtain, the set consisted of a pleasing mix of the older material, the sing-a-long-able and the air-drum-to, with a pinch of the new stuff, and two easily 25-minute long sonic noodlings. But nobody sang. Nobody air-drummed. The closest the crowd got to a reaction mid-noodle was a reserved bout of applause for a face-melting drum solo.

The Mars Volta, or The Mars Volta Group, or whatever, have always had an element of ‘sit there stroking your chin and posing’ about them, but when Cedric proclaimed ‘I like you all, you like to have a dance,’ the atmospheric lack-of-pressure became almost as laughable as when he screamed ‘I feel a miscarriage coming on!’ mid-Goliath. The truth is The Mars Volta Group (or whatever) turned up in full force and the crowd didn’t – as exemplified by a rousing sea of, erm, four lighters held feebly aloft during a delicate rendition of ‘Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore’. I almost felt like ripping my top off, turning to the audience and starting a slow clap above my head, if it weren’t for the neon-dour lady and, you know, social norms.

The crowd turning up or not, however, is ultimately irrelevant when a band like TMV(G) are in the form they were in. The tea-fuelled Bixler-Zavala was belting out flawless psuedo-screaming notes – a post-improv roar at the climax of a fabulous extended version of ‘Cicatriz ESP’ was worth the admission alone – all the while throwing extraordinary eel-like shapes with abandon and looking to do serious harm to the front row with his mic-stand. The epic twiddly improv sections were the most engrossing half-hours of the night, lights pulsing and every guitar string, bongo and cymbal harmoniously wailing, while the subtleness of the sampling meant it was totally believable that the five men on stage were producing the CD-like wall of noise we expect from TMV (if anything, the tracks were a little too true-to-recording; a little playfulness with the standards wouldn’t have gone amiss); nothing could detract from a band as enthralling as this. Not even a pit so limp that it appeared to be on life-support.

Words by Joel Golby