Following the dissolution of At The Drive-In, vocalist Cedric Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez splintered off to make a project inspired by Pink Floyd’s Piper At the Gates of Dawn. 

While it might not have much sonic similarity to that influence, their debut full-length, De-Loused in the Comatorium is an absolute masterpiece marked with aural chaos and intricate composition.

This record has widespread acclaim, but my own love for this record is a little more personal than that.

In the spring of 2005, I was a high school senior who had been going through a bit of a spiritual awakening. One night, I felt compelled to throw out all of my “secular” music. For months, I didn’t listen to anything that wasn’t explicitly Christian (save your sympathies for later—I mostly just listened to mewithoutYou over and over again).

That fall, I was a freshman at a Christian college, and I started to get a little worn on the only-Christian-music thing. I allowed myself a couple “secular” indulgences—mostly post rock because it had no words, or Sigur Ros because I couldn’t understand what they were saying. But one day, Coheed and Cambria announced a new record, and since they were one of my favorite bands in high school, I wanted to listen to it.

I spent weeks praying and seeking wisdom over what to do. At one point, I didn’t listen to any music for a whole week. After that week, I felt a peace in allowing myself to listen to whatever I wanted.

I went through my roommate’s CD wallet and found a copy of this record. I had loved At the Drive-In, but I had never listened to the Mars Volta. I popped it in the boombox and settled in to listen through it.

And without exaggeration, when “Son et Lumiere” crashed into “Inertiatic ESP,” I felt the presence of God fill my room more fully than any church service. It was one of the most profound religious experiences I had ever had in my life.

And that was free of the artists’ intentions. Cedric and Omar are outspoken atheists. De-Loused was loosely based on the drug overdose of a friend of theirs. But they are masters of sound and music. Their mastery was such that the creator of music was revealed in their work, whether they wanted him to or not.

In that moment, the line between the secular and the sacred blurred completely. The Divine was not confined by these arbitrary dividers. He could be found anywhere. Thirteen years later, that same sense of awe still fills me when I listen to this record.

And rightfully so. The album is a perfect blend of masterful composition and sonic anarchy. There’s perhaps no better example of this than the twelve-minute “Cicatriz ESP,” which features a seven-minute freeform jam in the middle of what is otherwise a rather straightforward rock song. “Televators” augments an acoustic guitar with atmospheric noises and Latin hand percussion. There’s even some leftover post-hardcore from their At the Drive-In days, most notably in the furious “Take the Veil Cerpin Taxt.”

Across ten tracks and a sixty-minute runtime, De-Loused in the Comatorium is a bonafide masterpiece. And while some might dismiss The Mars Volta for their pretentious fascination with improvised chaos, their debut escapes much of that criticism.