Mars Volta

Mars Volta have given details about their interesting new album, the follow up to 2006's 'Amputechture'. The release date is due on January 28, and is entitled 'The Bedlam In Goliath'. Speaking about the lyrical tone of the album, frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala said he was influenced by a trip guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez took to Jerusalem.

Bixler-Zavala said: "He brought me back... what you'd call a Ouija board in the States and we started playing with it... we used to get the band to play it a lot after we'd play shows in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do."

The band called the gift 'The Soothsayer'. Bixler Zavala said: "It serves the same function as a Ouija board but it's just a little more archaic... This version of it had a sort of love triangle that was attached to it - the poems we found with it sort of described a mother-daughter-and-other-man love triangle, and what I came up with from it was we were being contacted by at least three people on the board that would come up as one person.

"We wrote down a lot of messages they gave us, and we used it in the lyrics and we also tried to fasten the lyrics into sort of like a good luck charm, by putting positive elements into it."

The band eventually encountered a lot of "bad luck" and decided to throw the instrument away.

Rodriguez Lopez buried the object and was sworn not to tell anyone in the band where he had hidden it.

He said: "Because such a strange impact was left by using the board, we decided to make a record based on... the stories we were getting from the things or spirits we were contacting.

"The album is basically a sort of ... it's like the 'Ghostbusters' when they want to catch a ghost, they throw out this little trap on the floor, and they open it.

"(The) record serves as a bunch of little traps, so when the record comes out, people will have those traps, and they can play the game and try to reverse the bad luck we've had come from it. It's our way of creating a little infernal machine, but we've reversed it, for good luck."

The album includes 'Aberinkula', 'Metatron' 'Ilyena' and 'Tourniquet Man', as well as the first single 'Wax Simulcra'.

Of the sound he told MTV News: "It goes in different directions and has different moods, but for new people who know nothing about us, there are those shorter songs, and I think that might appeal to some people.

"It was never done in any sort of 'Let's get on the radio' intention, but it does help, I guess. The whole album is completely interactive for the listener, and there's something concrete to sink your teeth into. There is a story there, even if it is vague sometimes."