Noctourniquet

Noctourniquet is the sixth full length album by The Mars Volta and was their last album prior to their temporary disbanding.  The majority of the album was recorded in 2009 following the recording of Octahedron.  The fast recording process and expectation for Cedric to produce more lyrics put a strain on their relationship.  Per Omar: “He and I have very few arguments after twenty years of being friends, and we sort of got into this argument. He felt that he’s been trying to keep up with my pace for all these years, and it’s not natural for him, and he didn’t think we had to put out a record every year. He wanted to take his time with it, and he didn’t like me being on top of him like I usually am. […] So I said okay, well, you have the record in your hands. When you’re ready, you’ll call me and we’ll do it. And a year went by, two years went by, and I sort of started telling him well, wait a minute. […] It was just a strange record for me. I’m used to taking what I always say are snapshots — Polaroid shots — of where I’m at, and this is more like a long, drawn-out… something.”

Cedric did not complete vocals for the album until 2011 making it the album that took the longest to create.  The extended time between Omar recording his parts and Cedric finishing lyrics caused Omar to be disenfranchised with the album, per Juan: “We recorded a lot of it three or four years ago, so it’s hard for me to remember everything. It’s not like I have a lot of time in the studio. Omar just sits me down and wants to get it over with. This one more than ever.

With Frances The Mute, we spent a ton of time doing bass. Same thing with Amputechture. Then Octahedron was kind of weird. It started getting to the point where he didn’t want to spend a lot of time on it, he just wanted to blast through it. The last record was just like, “Let’s get this thing done.” It wasn’t a lot of fun, but my stuff on there was fun because I got to do more of what I do on the bass instead of taking complete directive. He would show me the basic skeleton, and then I would make it my own. But, a lot of the songs that I had to overdub at the end, he was just like “play it note for note.”

He told me he said in a recent Guitar World interview that he remembers when we did bass how bummed out I was just because he was already in a different head space. He wasn’t happy about the album taking that long. He was just kind of burned out on it. It’s hard to work on something you created three years ago and then go back to it again. So he just wasn’t in a good head space to do it. At one point I even asked him, “Can you just leave me in the studio with the engineer and I’ll cut it all, then you just okay it? Because the energy is just so dark.”

It was hard for me to feel good while cutting it because of him sitting there not wanting to be there. Omar is a guy who is working on things that are way beyond anything that we’re doing now. He’s just an artist like that. He gets bored easily and has to constantly be on the verge of creating something new for himself.”

It has also been revealed during other interviews that Omar plays many of the bass parts on the album as well as the entirety of the synthesizer parts, meaning Marcel is not on the album.  Omar made a deliberate effort to limit his guitar playing on the album, focusing more on keyboards and synthesizers.  Additionally, this is the first recorded The Mars Volta project to not have Ikey credited.  He was not asked to return following the conclusion of the Octahedron tour.

Noctourniquet is the only album to feature Deantoni Parks as the drummer, who would play with the band during the supporting tours.  Omar and Cedric had mentioned multiple times that Deantoni was the drummer they wanted in The Mars Volta after Blake was removed from the band, but due to his commitments to Kudu and other projects he was unable to.  Omar has stated that much of what Deantoni recorded was his first or second take, specifically stating “He sort of does away with all the clichés that I’ve come to accept over the years with drummers. […] I gave him way more freedom than I’d given any other drummer, and still I feel like it wasn’t enough […] I’ve had to wrestle with drummers, wrestle with musicians, to get them to understand my technique, [but] I don’t think we did more than two takes on anything, and we usually took his first take. And if we did more than that, it was merely for my own enjoyment because I was so blown away by what I was hearing.

The lyrics of Noctourniquet are based on a story by Cedric called “The Boy with the Knives in his Voice.”  Around the time of the albums release he alluded that a graphic novel or some other form of art medium may be released to further explore the story, but this never occurred.  

The Malkin Jewel was released as the first single, although many of the tracks had already been played live during the 2011 Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group tour.  Allegedly in 2011 the album was already complete.  It is not clear the cause of the delay of the album’s release, although fans speculated that Warner Brothers wanted to delay the album until 2012.  There is no actual known justification for the delay.  

A live version of The Malkin Jewel was added as a bonus track on the Japanese release.  An alternate live version of The Malkin Jewel was released as a pre-order exclusive.  Other pre-order bundles included the album with shirts or a 12×12 lithograph.  The band also held a contest for creating a music video for The Malkin Jewel.  

Charting

Australian Albums (ARIA) – 18
Austrian Albums (Ö3 Austria) – 66
Belgian Albums (Ultratop Flanders) – 90
Canadian Albums (Billboard) – 44
Dutch Albums (Album Top 100) – 61
Finnish Albums (Suomen virallinen lista) – 23
French Albums (SNEP) – 130
German Albums (Offizielle Top 100) – 58
Japanese Albums (Oricon) – 32
New Zealand Albums (RMNZ) – 25
Norwegian Albums (VG-lista) – 34
Spanish Albums (PROMUSICAE) – 83
Swiss Albums (Schweizer Hitparade) – 47
UK Albums (OCC) – 51
US Billboard 200 – 15
US Top Alternative Albums (Billboard) – 6
US Top Rock Albums (Billboard) – 7
US Top Tastemaker Albums (Billboard) – 3