Let’s face it, the Mars Volta have pretty much perfected that big sprawling rock cyberscape kinda thing, so when Paul D’Amour – Tool bass-player and sometime director of videos – decides to crank-up the volume and out-gross the gross, experimental weirdness of previous ventures like Lusk, you have to be prepared for a bumpy ride.
Written, performed and produced by D’Amour in his Topanga Canyon studio, Feersum Ennjin hovers menacingly over warped time signatures, queer chord changes and crunching, QOTSA style-guitar breaks. It’s not pretty by any stretch of the imagination but ‘Lines’, which opens this five-song mini-album, at least captures that eerie, claustrophic, pursued-by-a-gang-of-flesh-eating-robot-zombies quality that D’Amour is patently after. It’s also peculiarly New-Romantic too, oddly enough. In fact, ‘Solid Gold’ sounds like Duran Duran and Tears For Fears as fronted by Syd Barrett. Bizarre.
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