If this were UK tabloid material the headline might read ‘At The Drive In Crash In On Prog-Rock-Suicide-Benz’. Steeped in a dense lyrical labyrinth of myth and speculation, the album cites the death of artist friend and collaborator, Julio Venegas in 1996 as it’s broad and brutally skewed conceptual basis. The alleged free spirit and free-thinker, bearing the scabby welts and scars of a radically tortured soul attempts suicide with a morphine overdose and lapses into a coma from which he later wakes, only to find his richly heightened conscience urging him to take his life again. The dreams he has, and the things he has seen are deemed so fantastic as to render the remainder of his life bland and unremarkable. A bit like a Glastonbury comedown, right down to the fag-burns on your arm and your interstellar head.
The ‘Unbearable Lightness Of Being’? Well kind of. Except on this occasion it’s an unbearable lightness that is meted out with only the fattest and most grandiose of head-fuck instrumentation: big sprawling, whirligig guitars, gymnastic bass runs, drum rolls from Armageddon and time-signatures from Mars. All that is really missing are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Cut to a pattern of epic on a scale of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Homer’s ‘Iliad’, ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’ recalls the bloated cosmic fall-out of early Yes and the prodigious punk-baroque of Muse and Dredg. It’s dense, it’s heavy and it’s stuffed with an equally mighty pie filling of gothic sci-fi nonsense. Battle between elemental good and evil? You know the drill….
With contributions from Flea of the ‘Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ and assorted ex-At The Drive In members, ‘Deloused In The Comatorium’ was never going to be unremarkable. And it’s not, quite frankly.
*And another thing, if it wasn’t morbid enough already the band’s late sound manipulator Jeremy Ward, passed away after a heroin overdose on the eve of this album’s release. Spooky, huh?