American prog rock band The Mars Volta have put their comeback concept album on hold after deciding that the subject matter was not intelligent enough for their improvised 20 minute riff jams.
The band had intended to chronicle the current Australian election on the album – which was rumoured to be titled Carpe Vedamalady In The Electioneering – but have ditched the idea after following the first five days of the campaign, leaving the future of the band hanging in the balance.
“This was meant to be the grand comeback,” a label source told SPA Confidential. “The band had been working on a number of genius ideas, like recording the vocals while submerged in a three-week-old bubble bath and playing all the guitar solos with a pencil, but at the end of the day they just decided it was just all a bit above Australian politics.”
The band had first been attracted to the election after Julia Gillard's backstabbing of Kevin Rudd and then vice versa, which emulated the band's own break-up and joined the press plane to follow the campaign around and collect field recordings. The first single, Six Points Asylum Desorden was going to be an introspective 16 minute feedback piece with echoed heavy breathing, unrelenting noodling solos, blast beats and samples from a One Nation rally.
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“The experiences they had on the trail made it clear to the band that Australian politics just aren't quite at the level of a Mars Volta concept album, and they're now exploring different narratives to focus the album around.”
A number of those alternative ideas are being discussed in an email between band members, which has been leaked to SPA Confidential. They include: a study of the customers who attended a pop-up store for rubber products and rubber-related derivatives over a two week period; a turf war between two retired blind cat ladies and the lifecycle of a stick of chewing gum.
The current favourite however, with 54 percent of the band's vote, is the story a love triangle between an exercise bike salesman from the television shopping network, the late night host of Psychic TV and a giraffe.
