Gnawing your way through a new Mars Volta record is always something of a chore at first. The band — anchored by instrumentalist/composer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and lyricist/vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala — turns out huge mind-fucks as songs, mixing prog-metal, psychedelia and swaggering Latin flavors into massive, album-long narratives whose intent is…

On the Bled’s 2001 EP, His First Crush, the album cover bears the line “Can you still feel the butcher knives?” While it’s a clever play on Jimmy Eat World’s chorus to “For Me This Is Heaven,” from Clarity — “Can you still feel the butterflies?” — it’s also an…

Yeah, I jumped off a cliff, but let’s talk about something else,” Elliott Smith told me in1997. It was shortly after the release of his breakthrough album on Kill Rock Stars, Either/Or, and Smith had recently attempted suicide by throwing himself off a cliff, suffering only minor injuries. Long before…