The Mars Volta’s first KC show in 14 years goes full barnburner at Uptown

The Mars Volta @ Uptown on Oct 8, 2023. // Photo by Brock Wilbur

The Mars Volta swung through The Uptown on Sunday night, marking their first KC stop in almost a decade an a half.

Opening act Teri Gender Bender, known previously from Guadalujara’s Le Butchrettes and a frequent tour partner to the band, took the stage for an electronic dance energy-driven party that bordered on the performance art end of things. Truly a perfect pairing. The OUTSIDERS EP from July of this year is a great place to start if you caught part of their set and want to dive in further.

Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez took the stage, and welcomed the audience with a slow swelling spectacle of “Vicarious Atonement” that both set a tone of synthy spacial relations but also served as a chance for Bixler-Zavala to ease in on showing the audience his vocals are still in top form, both in power and pitch, before Rodriguez-Lopez cut into the wall of gently-rising noise to give way to Volta wrecking ball “Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of).”

The Mars Volta @ Uptown on Oct 8, 2023. // Photo by Brock Wilbur

“L’Via L’Viaquez” came next with the Latin groove finally establishing itself as the dancey yin to the yang of the night’s impenetrable wall of noise. Playing an overwhelmingly De‐Loused in the Comatorium-based set, tracks came and went as part of an unending hour plus of constant sound. “Drunkship of Lanterns” seemed to resolve only to have its final verses burst free nearly 20 minutes and two songs later, in one of the musical choices for the night that felt like callback and jazz in-jokes for the fans. And this was certainly the audience for it, as the packed house of dedicated fans were the type to suddenly throw phones in the air when they heard random picking/scraping on the guitar—not so much recognizing the start of a specific song as much as a tone or effect pre-cogging the audience to what track was on deck.

The Mars Volta @ Uptown on Oct 8, 2023. // Photo by Brock Wilbur

“Graveyard Love” off the new album was the biggest highlight of new songs in the mix, but the biggest overall note was the inclusion of new touring members jazz pianist Leo Genovese and drummer Linda-Philomène Tsoungui. Tsoungui just beat the ever lovin’ shit out of that kit from start to finish, cutting through a reverb-drenched squall to keep the stampeding elephant of Mars Volta on a straight path and giving their chaos a directorial throughline. That directionality seems to be what defines this show as separate from the (many) others we’ve caught over the years, as a map to the chaos and a limited space to play in within the songs seemed to benefit the show, and the band, as a whole. A tight 90-ish minutes and 13-ish songs had just the right amount of space to play in for the songs that benefitted from spacial play, and kept some of the others focused in a way that previous tours have, let’s say, eschewed.

The Mars Volta @ Uptown on Oct 8, 2023. // Photo by Brock Wilbur

20 years in, The Mars Volta feel like they’ve hit a proper stride that we hope to see them chase, with all the confidence and skill that sets them far apart from so many of their adjacent peer legacy acts. Hopefully with more regularity locally than once every 14 years. Heartbreak feels good in a place where we can shout in glorious unison *checks notes* “exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed!”

The tour hits ahead of a new documentary premiere at the end of the month. Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird (dir. Nicolas Jack Davies) charts the artistic and personal relationship between Rodríguez-López and Bixler-Zavala told almost entirely through hundreds of hours of self-shot footage filmed by Omar over the last 30-ish years. So that’s one to look for on the horizon. Those are two musical geniuses with some of music’s most complicated interpersonal history and we would like to see it.

Setlist
Vicarious Atonement
Roulette Dares (The Haunt Of)
L’Via L’Viaquez
Graveyard Love
Drunkship of Lanterns
Shore Story
Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt
Asilos Magdalena
Cicatriz ESP
Drunkship of Lanterns (Shipdrunk)
The Widow
Son et lumiere
Inertiatic ESP