Back at the turn of the century guitarist/producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala decided to form a musical partnership called The Mars Volta. They grabbed a few other intrepid musicians and recorded The Tremulant EP, which was incredible and weird and proved these guys were trailblazing far from the paths tread by their prior band, At the Drive-In. 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. The Mars Volta is an endlessly ambitious group intent on turning a standard concert into something transformative that can best be described as an aural blitzkrieg. And you know, as I do, that if the Volta comes to your town for a show that you have to be there or a little bit of your soul dies. That’s a science fact.