Scab Dates
- The Mars Volta
- Band Name: The Mars Volta
- Record Label: Universal
- Release Date: Nov 8, 2005
- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
Exhausting, self-indulgent, and also kind of awesome. [18 Nov 2005, p.134]
-
Marvellous. [5 Nov 2005, p.45]
-
One of those rare live offerings: a document that actually complements the band's catalog. [#12, p.95]
-
Scab Dates is yet another intriguing window into the Mars Volta's world, instead of just a live album holdover.
-
Seventy-three crack-in-the-earth's-crust minutes liquefy into the same basic miasma as the sophomore LP that inspired them, yet more streamlined, less apt to wander into the ambient dead zones like "Caviglia," a problematic disconnection of the disc's overall forward thrust.
-
60Your appreciation of Scab Dates will be predicated on a high tolerance to long bongo solos and songs called things like "Abrasions Mount The Timpani". [Jan 2006, p.113]
-
Scabdates is as exhilarating as it is confounding.
-
Scab Dates does an adequate job of capturing what is best experienced in the flesh.
-
60At its best, it's a fantastic album, with amazing musicianship that's emotionally striking. At it's worse, it's empty.
-
40The songs get lost in waves of wah-wah long before a long, slow fade into random-noise oblivion. [Dec 2005, p.149]
-
At once punishingly long and oddly incomplete. [Feb/Mar 2006, p.110]
-
35Given which songs are chosen and when this is being released, Scab Dates is a neither a concession nor a step forward, revealing inclinations that feel half as indulgent as they should when following a record like Frances the Mute, and about half as interesting to listen to.
-
The album is essentially a tried-and-true big-budget rock album gimmick writ large: smother the listeners in a minute or so of formless noise (using the artiest guitar and keyboard settings imaginable, of course), and then snap them out of the doldrums with the sweep of a heroic chord progression.
-
Wading through the next 70-plus minutes of wandering noise and blank hissing for the gems was painful, to put it mildly, because when I got to them, they were played off-key and incredibly quickly, as if the band wanted to get it over with and get back to banging on the guitars and making nonsensical noise.
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 15 out of 20
-
Mixed: 0 out of 20
-
Negative: 5 out of 20
-
2
-
kylel.10if you don't like this album its because its over your head. the closest our generation will ever get to led zepplin
-
Richard6