Amputechture

Weekend’s been chill. A lot of people leave on the weekends… I sleep a lot. I woke up around 3 PM today.

We played CU today in the Rocky Mountain Showdown- we won, 14-10. w00t. What I find hilarious is that our rival is the Buffs- just like MHS’s biggest rival. So I will get 8 full years of anti-Buff wonderfulness.

I have The Mars Volta’s new album, Amputechture. It’s cool on the first listen-through… Omar, the guitarist, co-produced it, and he mixed Jon Theodore, the drummer, WAAAY down. And he’s about half the reason I like TMV. And now he’s left the band, as it turns out… 😦
That said, it’s still a really good album.

I’m bored on the weekends. I need to come down to Arizona already. Time to look at the calendar tomorrow… :-/ I miss Arizona.

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2 responses to “Amputechture”

  1. Awesome CD.

    Mars Volta has always mixed drums low.

    I’ve often wondered if it would sound better if they were louder.

    Jon Theodore is amazing, but often on frances and amputechture, I think that the problem is that his drumming is a little too busy to be mixed loudly without interfering with the song. I geuss it is sort of a trade off- If they mixed him louder, He’d have to tone down his awesomeness.

  2. Always? I’m not so sure…. Check out:
    Son et Lumiere > Intertiatic segue
    Pretty much all of Roulette Dares
    The crazy stuff about 1:50 into Drunkship
    Mini-solo 6:50ish into L’Via Viaquez and the fill right after it

    I know that the drums are mixed low when Omar’s bugging out and they’re doing the classic Volta “everythings-on-crack-at-the-same-time” sound (like the beginning of Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus) but I think that TMV is very much more drum-centric than most bands. That’s hard to pull off, as you usually need someone to hook in the tempo, so there isn’t much room to tinker, but Theodore pulls it off somehow. A lot of Frances the Mute was composed between Jon and Omar- other stuff came in later.

    I hear Jon being totally crazy on Amputechture, but it’s almost hidden a lot of the time- it seems like a primary statement in the song that is hidden under the framework.