Mars Volta "The Malkin Jewel" From Upcoming Album

The sixth full-length studio album by the almighty latin-influenced progressive rock band The Mars Volta is scheduled for release 38 days from today (I literally counted) on March 27th, 2012. Titled 'Noctourniquet', practically most of  the instrumentation materials was actually already recorded in 2009, but ongoing arguments between vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zaval and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López halted the album from being completed for its initial release schedule.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/36509499" iframe="true" /]

To demonstrate a little taste of what's to come, the band released the album's first single "The Malkin Jewel" on February 14th.  Although the song does have quite an impressive eerie carnival-like reggae groove to it, but Cedric's alternating sizzling croons and  raging snarls is moderately stale compared to his reputational vocal ability, and overall, the song progression is a bit repetitive. Fortunately, Omar's spasmodic crunchy rhythm and drummer Deantoni Parks's arcane percussion accommodates the grandeur edge it needs, and for a group like Mars Volta known for their explicit concept approach, one song can't be used as a measurement of the real direction the band is taking for the album. Especially within this song, after minute 3:00 the song becomes fairly interesting with its psychotropic discord, a distinguished trait of this particular band.

38 days and counting down, we'll see what 'Noctourniquet' is all about.