En mi propia re-lectura, Tool es sobretodo una banda de rock metal-progresivo, que usa angustiosas vocalizaciones fantasmales y una progresion altamente tecnica, fractal de tonalidades ritmicas que varian en precisas progresiones aritmeticas pero finitas, las mismas que van sufriendo dislocaciones y deliciosos cambios ritmicos, sus guitarras y bajos devienen en cascadas disonantes y estratificadas, dispuestas a contrababor de tambores cronometrados en frecuencia de repliegue y contrapunteo instantaneo, bajos militares climaxeandose en un parpadeo insospechado a Ramsteinianas cadencias autoritarias, mientras voces rebeldes cantan a viva voz el hilo del argumento final y definitivo, para devenir zigzagueante en una expiacion de culpas y razones que se abren de frente y decididamente hacia un suavizado horizonte cacofonico de espacios, rebotes y ecos, tranquilidad y vientos de hendidura, dialogos y espiritus que hablan filigranas mantricas y reflexiones Krishna-tibetanas, la sabiduria encarnada en un instante que se auto-extermina en polirritmos pinkfloydianos estrellandose violentamente contra un precipicio sin fondo.
Technorati tags: Tool, Lateralus, Prog Rock, Musica, Rock Progresivo
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Tool: 5 años despues
Hace unos dias, en Diciembre del pasado año, Tool saco para su venta dos DVDs sencillos, Schism y Parabol/Parabola. ¿Coincidencia? Como preparacion a su ultimo album, Lateralus, el grupo saco un combo CD/DVD combo con el nombre de Salival. Salival salio a finales del 2000, y Lateralus en Marzo del 2001. Es claro que con esta primicia Tool solo nos esta preparando para la salida de un nuevo album. De hecho han sido mas transparentes esta vez: los DVD sencillos tienen pegada una etiqueta que dice que el Nuevo [y todavia innombrado] album saldra esta proxima Primavera. Curiosamente, el penultimo album de Tool, Aenima, salio a la venta 5 años antes que Lateralus, en Octubre de 1996.
Parece que la banda estuvo trabajando en el innovador disco todo el 2005 y actualmente se encuentran mezclando las sesiones para su edicion final. En otra entrevista con Yahoo Launch!, el baterista Danny Carey menciona que el nuevo disco sera una progresion natural en su sonido, mas visionario, mas duro, la siguiente etapa de su desarrollo. Suena bien.
http://www.soundgenerator.com/news/index.cfm?articleid=6678
Technorati tags: Tool, Lateralus, Prog Rock, Musica, Rock Progresivo
Parece que la banda estuvo trabajando en el innovador disco todo el 2005 y actualmente se encuentran mezclando las sesiones para su edicion final. En otra entrevista con Yahoo Launch!, el baterista Danny Carey menciona que el nuevo disco sera una progresion natural en su sonido, mas visionario, mas duro, la siguiente etapa de su desarrollo. Suena bien.
http://www.soundgenerator.com/news/index.cfm?articleid=6678
Technorati tags: Tool, Lateralus, Prog Rock, Musica, Rock Progresivo
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
The Mars Volta - Rankings obtenidos en el 2005
Enlisto a continuacion una muestra de los top rankings que obtuvo The Mars Volta - Frances The Mute en el 2005 [algunos comentados]. Lo mas sorprendente es claro, que TMV haya tenido el eco que tuvo en las revistas de musica del mainstream, incluyendo las mas poperas [chequeen la de PopMatters mas abajo], lo cual podria parecernos increible si no supieramos que hay un fuerte contingente de 14añeros que empieza a entusiarmarse con el sonido Marsvoltiano.
AntiMusic.com - #5 in Best of 2005
The antidote to stale music everywhere. Early in 2005, TMV dropped an insane concept album slapping music fans with an indefinable mix of musical styles. Blowing tons of neurons, this one's a no-brainer for one of the top albums of 2005. Catchy, dark, intense, and simply powerful, this is the very definition of rock music....for people who like their rock to be kicking, screaming, and scaring the ignorant masses as opposed to being dead and decaying in the barren ground. Viva la Volta! - Mark
IndieWorkshop - #9 in Top 50 Records of 2005
Blender - #9 in The 50 Greatest CDs of 2005 Poll
From Mariah to the Mars Volta to M.I.A., 2005 was a fantastic year for music — and that’s just the “M”s! But only the very finest releases made it onto Blender’s alphabet-spanning top 50.
NPR National Public Ratio - Top 10 CDs of 2005
Five minutes into most latter-day prog rock, and the big ideas driving the music seem to shrink, becoming routine platforms for show-offs. Not so with The Mars Volta's mindbendingly intricate second album Frances The Mute. This five-song cycle achieves its grandeur gradually, through detours into totally plausible son montuno rhythms, hiccuping King Crimson syncopations, the majestic melodies of Pink Floyd circa Wish You Were Here, or thrashy dissonant collisions rendered in horrifying slow motion.
Spin - #12 in the 40 Best Albums of 2005
Great punk bands take what they want, then turn it into something else. Attacking the hobbit-infested shire of progressive rock, these shape-shifters -- led by ex-At the Drive-In duo Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler Zavala -- do battle with the concept album. On the quasi-sequel to 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium, Volta spin oblique tales inspired by a diary that late band member Jeremy Ward found in the back seat of a repo'd car. But if that MO sounds a bit out there, their space jams still have roots in our doomed stratosphere, and their noodling has a hardcore pulse. Classic rock for right now. C.R.
RateyourMusic - #`12 in Best of 2005
Piero Scaruffi - #12 in Best Rock Albums of 2005
Perhaps the only rock band to be truly unique (and sonically transgressive) in 2005, Mars Volta delivered Frances The Mute (Universal, 2005), an album that matched and surpassed the art-pomp of its predecessor. Except that here they tried to balance the urge to exhibit their astronomical technical skills with the desire to be actually understood by the audience. The intricate, nonlinear art of the first album is bent to more spectacular ends, with mixed results: instead of a brutally disjointed but viscerally effective stram of consciousness, we get a sequence of complete but incoherent fragments. Each of the five tracks is basically an album in itself, made of several sub-tracks that often collide with their neighbors instead of segueing smoothly from and into them. Theodore's drumming, Rodriguez's guitar, and Bixler's vocals seem to embody all the technical progress of the last two decades, from Red Hot Chili Peppers to Phish, from Korn to System Of A Down, as if progressive-rock (reincarnated in Mars Volta) was attempting to catch up with any relevant style developed after its heyday. The dizzying experience of dissecting Cygnus Vismund Cygnus and the 30-minute Cassandra Gemini is enough to swallow much of the recent history of rock music, like a black hole in waiting. It doesn't mean that everything is essential: one can easily argue that each track could have been trimmed down to make it more effective. It would have also helped focus on the fragments that truly matter, many of which are left in the air without a sensible development and ending.
Playlouder - #19 in the Top 50 Albums of 2005
Prog made something of a major comeback in 2005 and none were more prog-rock than the big haired, smacked-out South American lunatics The Mars Volta. While their erstwhile At the Drive-In brothers continued to plough a similar furrow to the old band, Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez went all-cosmic on our asses and took off to somewhere completely different; to a planet far, far away from which their scrambled, pretentious brains may never return. PlayLouder said: "It's a weird world we live in when progressive rock can sound this vital, this fresh, this downright exhilarating..."
Rolling Stone Magazine - #24 in Top 50 Records of 2005
Combining near-suicidal excess with hairpin-turn discipline, the Mars Volta's second album is the most confounding and compelling hard-rock album of '05: a wildly nonlinear, bilingual tale of abandonment and breakdown, scored with hyperfusion time changes, animal-guitar math and sudden healing pools of norteno folk and salsa piano. The only thing more astonishing than the swing from the concise avant-Zeppelin of "The Widow" to the half-hour lunacy of "Cassandra Gemini" is the idea that this kind of dementia could be played live. The proof: the end-of-year concert release Scabdates.
PopMatter - #35 in Best Albums of 2005
Los Sites de Rock Progresivo:
Obviamente, TMV estuvieron mejor rankeados en algunos de los websites de rock progresivo. Veamos:
Gagliarchives - #1 in Top 100 of 2005
Progressive Ears - Overall, this is an album that is so ambitious, so pretentious, and madder than a pink zebra who hasn't even seen his medication in weeks let alone taken it, that you can quite easily expect some people to hear just ten minutes of it and straight away dismiss is as interminable nonsense. And yet, the album has so much energy, imagination and ferocity to it, all traits that are lacking in 95% of contemporary prog and mainstream music as a whole. This album represents a step up from De-loused In The Comatorium and if The Mars Volta just showed a little more restraint and realized that sometimes less really is more then they could yet release a progressive rock masterpiece for the 21st Century. Only time will tell.
Prog Archives - #4 in Collaborators' Top 5 albums of 2005
Seen by many as the future of Prog Rock this TMV magnum opus has certainly helped re-awaken mainstream press interest in our favourite genre. The 30 minute epic Cassandra Gemmini will tell you everything you need to know about TMV and more besides.
Y hasta la prensa Punk, en Punknews.org - #6 in Top 20 albums of 2005! seleccionaron a FTM dentro del Top 10.
El rumor que mas suena es que ya se alista el nuevo Album, talvez para aparecer en vitrinas esta proxima Primavera o Verano
Technorati tags: Mars Volta, The Mars Volta, Prog Rock, Musica, Rock Progresivo, rankings