Thirty seconds in and the frontman's already earned himself a cigar. Cedric Bixler scores points not only for his triumphantly anti-rock name, but also for his magnificent Afro - still hairdressing's least hip barnet, despite what the style mags would have us believe - and his maniacal leap onto the drum riser almost before the lights have gone down.
Fashion is of course the very last thing on the minds of The Mars Volta. Very soon after the implosion of the mighty At The Drive-In - whose constitution from the outset seemed fragile, to put it mildly - Bixler and similarly coiffed band mate Omar Rodriguez assembled another, far more radical vehicle. Their former outfit's righteous post-hardcore was replaced by something altogether wilder and freer and The Mars Volta's ferocious live reputation grew at a rapid rate in Britain, fuelled in part by a hype almost in directly inverse proportion to their recorded output (just one, three-track EP, 'Tremulant', to date).
Tonight, Bixler, Rodriguez and chums party hard, certainly, but this is not quite the Andrew WK school of good times. The five peddle a bizarre and decidedly challenging blend of harsh, streamlined emo, free jazz and straight-up prog rock, which makes them sound like nothing so much as a Pavlov's Dog for the post-Fugazi generation.
Their mad extrapolation from what Americans call math rock involves much polyrhythmic perversity and 'tunes' which would see you in casualty if you tried to dance to them. They play a mere seven songs in their hour-plus set, which is some indication of their epic scale, there are jammy workouts aplenty, one (frankly inexcusable) drum solo and more noodling than in the combined eateries of Chinatown.
Still, despite a tendency to be straitjacketed by their own skronky intellectualism, The Mars Volta are an undeniably compelling, physical live force and a fireball of intensity burns around them. Bixler's impressive voice is three parts the athletic yowl of Robert Plant, one part Jon Anderson's anguished falsetto and 'Concertina' and 'Eunuch Provocateur' are particularly exultant tonight, despite the former resembling an outtake from Tim Buckley's 'Greetings From LA' as played by Yes.
'Eunuch Provocateur' is so bonkers it may well have been sectioned after the show, a skittering, yet impressively light-footed and perfectly controlled thing that sounds literally otherworldly. For a band so clearly hell-bent on pushing forward, The Mars Volta are curiously retro but, with them, the song remains anything but the same.
