The Bedlam In Goliath

The genesis of The Mars Volta's new album The Bedlam in Goliath is one of the weirdest stories in the history of modern music, a tale of long-buried murder victims and their otherworldly influence, of strife and near collapse, of the long hard fight to push "the record that did not want to be born" out into the world.

Omar was in a curio shop in Jerusalem when he found the Soothsayer. It seemed to him an ideal gift for Cedric, this archaic Ouija-style "talking board." So it was then and there, in a city where the air swims with religious fervor, in a shop that might as well have carried monkey's paws and Mogwais, that Omar changed the fate of The Mars Volta forever. Had he known at that moment that the board's history stretched far beyond its novelty appearance, that its very fibers were soaked through with something terribly other, that the choral death and desire of a multi-headed Goliath was waiting behind its gates well, he might have left it at rest there on the dusty shelves.

The Bedlam in Goliath is here to consecrate the grounds where the Soothsayer lies in wait. It's metaphor vs. metaphysics. Its story will be told to you and I, Lucky Listener, and we're the ones re-opening the board. Taking on the ownership. Perhaps if Goliath is spread between us all its hunger will dissipate. Or, as it threatened, it could become our epidemic.