Especially curious if you Nine Miles fans out there ever got into De Facto (Omar and Cedric's dub project that ended with Jeremy's death in 2003.), or Ikey's Free Moral Agents project. At The Drive-In and Mars Volta are still probably my favorites from the GSL imprint, but hearing Omar on bass and Cedric on drums and backing vocals was hella' interesting. Any thoughts?

Wow, I had never heard of either of those bands (Free Moral Agents, De Facto) until you said something, but I listened to both of them, and they are awesome. Good reccomendation. I don't know though, I'm not really catching a Nine Miles vibe off of it, it seems like more of a dirty Detroit-esque sound to me. One other observation is that these songs seem a WHOLE lot simpler compared to Mars Volta, which is nice because I don't have to spend so much time absorbing them.

I enjoy the complexities of the Mars Volta work (Try out tab on ultimate-guitar.com for my favorite of theirs, 'Sarchophagi', it's a bit difficult but it sounds wonderful.) 'Umbilical Syllables' is also hella' difficult to play, but good to hear. 'Cassandra Gemeni' is most likely the best on the new album though, in all of its glorious length, longer than either of Pink Floyd's epics. Glad to see someone finally went and got ahold of those other groups too, nice to see someone with an open mind for music. If you like those guys, you might also like The Secret Machines, a group from New York I've gotten into in the past few months. They're similar in the fact that they're quite different- They in fact hunted down the soundman for the old Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums to get ahold of their synth equipment and the like, so they can make sorts of noises that nobody else can anymore. It's very nice; You may like it because the songs are quite a bit simpler than some of the bands they admire, with the longest song at 9:00 and a small progression that's just layered to an extreme degree in a sort of crescendo type of movement with all of the backing, and the average song about 3 and a half minutes but with lots of distortions I can barely wrap my mind around, most stand-out being their bass sound. It's only three guys, so they each have to take up a lot of space so it sort of gives me a Rush vibe in that respect.

Also, if you haven't already, instead of listening to individual tracks of the Mars Volta, if you want to take them in at their best and as they are intended to be heard, do it in the fashion of taking in the entire album at length like one would do with Rush's "2112" or Pink Floyd's "The Wall", etc. They're both total concept albums, being "De-Loused In The Comatorium" and "Frances The Mute". The first was based on the life of a friend of theirs, Julio Venegas (Forgive me if I spelled his name incorrectly, I can never get it right.), and is about a man who tried to overdose on morphine to kill himself but failed and instead went into a coma, and it follows all the wonderous adventures he has in his dreams and visions, as well as the fact that after these enlightening dreams, he wakes up and instead decides to die.

'Frances The Mute' is based on a journal that Jeremy Ward found in a car before he died, and he read it and noted how the story in it seemed so similar to his own life. It's about the character Frances The Mute, and the 5 people he gets help from (Vismund Cygnus, Lady L'via, Miranda, The Widow and Cassandra Gemeni) in the search for his mother. They wrote the album in the wake of what they felt from Jeremy's death, which can certainly be percieved by listening to its depth. The same was true for 'De-Loused' and Julio, but Julio had been dead for ten years, and in actuality, he committed suicide by leaping off and overpass into moving traffic.

Of course, De Facto ended when its singer, Jeremy, died in 2003.

I also recommend to you that if you like FMA and De Facto to check out their label at www.goldstandardlabs.com , which is a label co-owned by Omar and with a ton of good bands from a wide variety of styles. Jaga Jazzist, a band to listen to if you're a jazz fan (And especially a Cowboy Bebop fan, I thought.), and also a band named by the Mars Volta as their favorite, exists on the label and should probably be the one I'd most advise checking into. Enjoy. n_n

I started listening to TMV like right when De-loused came out... I still have yet to hear the new album.
I also love Sparta. Have been listening to them since Wiretap Scars. Saw them in concert too, my first concert.

Anyway, funny thing is, I've only heard like 3 songs of ATDI.


Anyone else like Sparta? I notice very few TMV/ATDI fans like them.

Yeah man, Sparta is awesome. There was a time when I hadn't heard them, and all I knew was that Cedric and Omar split from them because they wanted to play different kinds of music. So I just thought Sparta would be kinda lame, but when I heard them, I was like, hmmmm, this sounds like At The Drive-In to me...

So yeah, you should definitely listen to At The Drive-In, they are soooooo good.

what songs do you recommend to listen to from defacto ?

I've heard tons of Nine Miles.

And I dont really get a similar vibe from Mars Volta.

I remember really liking Sparta when they first formed. Can't recall a lot about them otherwise, though, haha.

[quote="Kaze no Mirai"]I've played 17158 Nine Miles tracks. ≈ 1143 hours ≈ 47 days worth of Nine Miles.[/quote]

[quote="GoldenRhino"][quote="Kaze no Mirai"]I've played 17158 Nine Miles tracks. ≈ 1143 hours ≈ 47 days worth of Nine Miles.[/quote][/quote]

Thanks.

Sparta sucks
The Mars Volta are amazing, probably my favorite band right now.
Has anyone gotten the new album? I think it's pretty good. Not as good as De-Loused, but i'd say it's as good, maybe even better, than Frances the Mute.

John Alderete played with Racer X.

Racer X owns all these bands.

Win.

I like Mars Volta, but not as much as some people. I don't listen just a ton because it requires so much concentration that you can't be doing much else at the time. The only real beef I have with them is that it leans way, way too heavily on guitar - I would like to hear the other instrumentalists go wild for once. And Omar's noodling isn't nearly as interesting as, say, Yoshikane Sou's. He should stick with more thought-out solos and stuff.

I wasn't too impressed by Deloused, but I want to check out Amputechture since there's some supposed jazz vibe in it.

Tetragrammaton is fifteen minutes of awesomeness. Even though I haven't listened to the album that much, that song alone makes it worth the price of admission.