The Mars Volta hang the entire weight of De-loused in the Comatorium on whether you, as a listener, will accept and connect with a decision made at the end of the album.
De-Loused… tells a story. I’ve read a little about it (which helped me comprehend it precisely “a little”) and slowly absorbed since its release in the autumn of 03. In track two, “inertiatic esp,” we’re introduced to the protagonist, a fellow in a coma (“Coma-guy” for now). He is lost in his coma, travelling through a scary, vaguely sexy, vision-world. It reminds me of the vision quest Homer Simpson took after he ate the Insanity Pepper at Springfield’s chili cook-off. But without the fox-narrator. Coma-guy wanders this coma-world, this vision-quest, for the duration of songs 2-8. In #9, “televators,” Coma-guy wakes to our reality (the one in which you’re reading this [blog]) and, seeing it, chooses to release his hold on it and die.
This is the crux; do you believe the story so far, and do you care? Your answer will determine the record’s worth for you. After several listens I find, somewhat surprisingly, that I do.
If you journey with Coma-guy this far, closing track “take the veil cerpin taxt” will treat you to a higher-level vision. After death, it seems a new journey awaits that is to the coma-world of tracks 2-8 what the coma-world is to our reality (which we glimpsed only in track 9 – the crux). The Mars Volta reveal their vision of an afterlife as an exponential increase in insanity – an even hotter chili pepper, hotter than you even imagined your taste buds could transmit.