There are the essential albums that need to be in everyone's collection. There are the personal favorites, the ones that aren't highly acclaimed but still get played every once in a while. And then there are the albums that you stick in the back of your collection because you want to forget that you spent money on them. "Own It or Disown It" gives the writer the opportunity to look at such discarded albums and determine if they are diamonds in the rough or if they deserve to be used as mini-frisbees.
This isn’t an easy album for me to talk about. For one thing, it is a pretty straightforward punk-rock album—there’s not much to dissect. Also, this is one of my favorite albums of the past fifteen years, and I don’t know that I could say anything about it that hasn’t already been said. With At the Drive-In reuniting last week, though, I feel that a look at Relationship of Command is needed. Here goes nothing.
I’ll start with the flaws. Like everything that singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala has touched, the lyrics usually make no sense when viewed from any angle. The chorus to “Sleepwalk Capsules” is particularly obtuse—“Atop this podium/Built of fixation (they like to choke)/All utensils fixed on you”—and if anyone can explain the chorus of the Iggy Pop-featured “Rolodex Propoganda” (“In infrared is how we saw/The night that lit up scarecrow plots/The nerve that pinches crippled/Hobbled frolicked on its own face”), be my guest. There are also two duds on Relationship of Command, “Mannequin Republic” and “Non-Zero Possibility” (the bonus track aren’t that great, but they are bonus tracks, so who cares). I can’t say that the two songs are bad, but they are clearly the weakest tracks on the album.
And then there’s everything else on here, which is a million different kinds of awesome. “Arcarsenal” is one of the best opening tracks on any punk-rock album I’ve ever heard, “One-Armed Scissor” is practically a standard in the genre, “Enfilade” and “Quarantined” represent the direction that the Mars Volta could have gone (more on that in a second), and the band goes absolutely nuts with “Cosmonaut”. “Arcarsenal” through “Sleepwalk Capsules” make 15 minutes feel like 2 minutes, and the same goes for “Enfilade” through “Cosmonaut”. I understand that this kind of stuff is an acquired taste, but if you are into punk-rock, you’ll have a hard time finding a better album that came out in the last 15 years than this one.
When At the Drive-In split up, Bixler-Zavala and the guitarist, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, formed the Mars Volta. On the surface, TMV and ATDI are very similar—the lyrics are a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo, the guitar shredding can get pretty ridiculous, and both bands are vaguely progressive. Many people claim that the biggest difference is that TMV are a “prog-rock” band and ATDI are a punk band, but I think that’s like saying that The Princess Diaries and Rachel Getting Married are practically the same film because they both star Anne Hathaway. If ATDI (and Relationship of Command by extension) are to be compared to a progressive-rock band, it should be Tool. Both Tool and ATDI make sure that all of their obtuse mumbo jumbo is not just an exhibition of their own technical abilities but also operates in service of the overall song. That, in a nutshell, is why I love Relationship of Command and hate almost everything that the Mars Volta have ever put out. But that’s another column…
VERDICT: OWN
Sorry that this column is shorter than usual, but this is usually what happens when I have to analyze a good album. At the Drive-In weren’t the only band to reunite last week, though, and next time, I’ll go into detail as to why I have missed the Refused. See you in seven.
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