The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #221

#221: "The Widow" (2005) - The Mars Volta

In every review I've read of their work, The Mars Volta--who are, basically, just the re-christened remains of At the Drive-In--have been described as a progressive rock band (or some variant thereof); what's never mentioned, is that no prog-rock band of the past thirty-five years has had a vocalist with anywhere near the power nor range as the Volta's Cedric Bixler-Zavala; in fact, his banshee-wails are so phenomenal that his vocals come close to overwhelming whatever noise and velocity his backing band--and any band with Omar Rodriguez-Lopez at guitar is a great backing band--may produce. With those vocals, and the Volta's use of electrified power chords, the Mars Volta more closely sounds like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin than they do Yes or King Crimson--and they're the better for it.

As much as they venture off into the sci-fi Galaxy of Excessive Noodling and Ephemery, Bixler-Zavala's delivery always bring the songs back to Earth, for as loud and as much as he can scream, Bixler-Savala knows how to connect, knows how to dial it down during the verses, knows how to use breathiness to intimate intimacy. His use of vocal dynamics is expert; he can build to a crescendo like nobody's business, then float back down, seemingly spent. This technique--one that professional public speakers use--can be evidenced (how sloppy a sentence construction was that?!?) in capsule form (as most of the Volta's songs are of epic length) in "The Widow," a song that actually made it to the Billboard Hot 100; how it charted there, I'll never know, for it sounds nothing like any other rock song that charted at the time (which means it didn't sound like as if it were cloned from a Nickelback record).

Not only do we get Bixler-Zavala's rise-and-fall wail all over the record, we also get some cryptic and creepy lyrics, ostensibly about someone who stays up with someone dying from lung cancer--or in a coma--and unable to rid himself of the nightmares caused by whatever strange things happen when the narrator's in the room with the patient. Rodriguez-Lopez's frenetic soloing adds to the paranoic frenzy, as do the spare (but effective) use of strings, and the acoustic strumming during the verses, and some subtle, strange effects used throughout the song, mixed in (and mixed in well) simultaneously with the other instrumentation. There's even a trumpet--played by Flea! It's Pearl Jam's "Jeremy;" it's Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven;" it's all these, but it's scarier, and weirder, and it's got a strange backstory.

In the prepartaion of the album (Frances the Mute) on which this song would appear, sound tech (and one-time member of At the Drive-In) Jeremy Ward found a diary from a car he repossessed, and the diary--and its characters--inspired the creation of all the songs on the album. This song--"The Widow"--was, of course, inspired by one of the characters in that diary, but it was also inspired by Ward himself, as Ward died from a drug overdose in 2003, not long after he had given the band the diary he'd found. So...you've got those undercurrents running through the song, as well as the fact that both Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez vowed never to use opiates again after Ward's death.

Listen to this song, and then ask yourselves, "If this is what the Mars Volta sound like when not influenced [directly] by drugs, I wonder what they sounded like when they were?"