No, their music is seriously awful. Why all the hate? Lemme tell you: First of all... They're not even that talented. The drummer/bassist on all the stuff I've heard is really good, but the main guitar player is a joke. Endless
boring solos followed by shitty riffs and extended protools-effected guitar layer noises (which are also boring). Who cares. The singer is absolutely atrocious. So, he can hit a high note. Who gives a shit? Also, not that this matters, but his lyrics are the worst I've ever heard, ever, in all the history of recorded music, worse than Slipknot, Hedpe, Mudvayne, ICP, etc. I mean, I gotta give points to the guy for knowing how to read a thesaurus but still. As I mentioned elsewhere, the guitarist insulted fans and non-fans of this band in a Guitar World interview. Look it up somewhere, I'm sure you can ask about it on any mars volta message board and get the full text. He said something along the lines of, "People come up to me and say 'hey it's cool you wrote a 30 minute song' and I'm like 'fuck you. That's not what our band is about. That's only one aspect. I can't stand people who only like our technical side. Or our long songs. We mean more than that. Fuck people who don't get it." blah blah blah. The most assholeish, idiotic, pretentious moron to have ever existed... Most of their songs have no flow. Again, endless copy-and-paste protools editing doesn't really equal good songwriting. Yeah, they play the songs live, but don't they, uh, "evolve" the live version of the songs into extended jam sessions? That's because they don't know how to write songs! Overly compressed endless Rush/Prince/Ricky Martin bullshit jam session garbage. That is a big trap for prog bands who want to pack in endless amounts of time changes, riffs, and so on... how do you make the songs
flow organically? Well, listen to most of the bands I mentioned earlier in this thread and hear that, hey, it can actually happen! I just find their music to be unlistenable garbage. I've listened to their first few albums a few times to try to see if there was anything I was missing. And, no, I'm not missing anything. I can usually say something good about all bands, but I will go ahead and say I think the Mars Volta have almost no redeeming qualities. In fact, I think they are the worst band I've heard in my entire life.
Anyway, I don't agree with all of this (for example, I think the breakdown at 3:20 into the first song on this album is the only good moment in any of their songs; too bad it lasts about 5 seconds), but this is hilarious:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/your...mars-volta.php
Final thought: If people somehow genuinely like this stuff, I
seriously reccomend checking out some of the bands I mentioned a few posts back...