With Omar Rodriguez-Lopezsuddenly reforming At The Drive-In, his Mars Volta bandmate/brother Marcel has time to spend with his other project, Zechs Marquise. Based in El Paso, the latter Rodriguez-Lopez plays drums in the instrumental progressive rock band with his other brothers Marfred and Rikardo on bass and keyboards, respectively. Their sophomore album, Getting Paid, dropped late last year from Rodriguez-Lopez Productions (it’s a family thing), and they’ve just delivered a new video for one of the tracks.
We first brought you their single “Everlasting Beacon Of Light” back in August. The track leans towards trip-hop before erupting into typical Rodriguez Brothers insanity, but the video pretty much starts and ends in the insane. In the clip, the name of the song appears to be the name of a smokeable drug. Inhalation of said drug leads to animal-headed people, dusty graveyards, latino gangs, and secret Zechs Marquise shows. Talk about gateway drugs. Check out the exclusive video, directed by The 90s, below.
Artist: Zechs Marquise Album Title: Getting Paid Release Date: September 27, 2011 Label: Rodriguez Lopez Productions
01. Getting Paid 02. Lock Jaw Night Vision 03. Static Lovers 04. The Heat, The Drought, The Thirst, and The Insanity 05. Time Masters 06. Guajira 07. Everlasting Beacon of Light 08. Crushin’ It! 09. Mega Slap
Zechs Marquise, the El Paso, TX quintet are back with their sophomore album Getting Paid, bringing an intensified swagger to the band’s multifaceted psych-prog haze for their most aggressive and versatile effort to date. “We liked that hip-hop attitude,” explains drummer Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez of the album title. “Getting your piece, taking yours.” And, Getting Paid certainly finds the band fully taking charge of their musical destiny.
El Paso-based prog band Zechs Marquise released Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare in 2009 and the much tighter and more original Getting Paid on On Rodriguez Lopez Productions via Sargent House in 2011. Getting Paid received appreciative reviews but the band was often written about in terms of the bassist and the drummer’s older sibling Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and his prog-rock band The Mars Volta. Zechs Marquise contains keyboardist Riko Rodriguez Lopez, bassist/vocalist Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez and drummer Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez, who also plays keys in The Mars Volta.
It’s no coincidence that both bands have similar influences. “We get a lot of comparisons to Mars Volta because of our relation or whatever, but the main difference is that Marcel and I were heavily influenced by hip-hop, where our brother Omar was influenced by punk rock, and salsa. We were influenced by hip-hop and salsa. So, it has that dynamic. We were all in the same house growing up listening to the same music. You influence each other, living together for so long. You develop each others tastes in a weird way,” Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez says over the phone.
One might wonder if there could be any sibling rivalry among this clan of intense prog fiends. In a word: nope. The Rodriguez-Lopez members of The Mars Volta and Zechs Marquise tour with each other and gig with each other. Zechs Marquise opened when Omar Rodriquez Lopez’s earlier band At the Drive-In played a hometown reunion show. When they get done with all of that they take a break, in order to hang out with each other.
They are, in fact, doing exactly this when Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez answers his cell for the interview. The brothers are driving back to Texas with their dad after a weekend spent going to baseball games in Los Angeles. “All of us spend our fair share of time away from home, so it’s nice to get to have these last-minute trips with our dad,” says Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez. Empirically speaking, it is the sweetest thing ever.
Lately, reviews of the Zechs Marquise live show and the slow-building recognition for Getting Paid have be taking the band from status as the little brother of The Mar Volta to a known quantity in its own right. Note to aspiring indie rockers: a little touring had something to do with that. Also, Getting Paid is some fine music. The twelve instrumental tracks fuse funk and prog-rock without being tedious or anachronistic. Cerebral and psychedelic it might be, but it’s also brash and pugnacious: Old music for young heads by young heads. Rodriguez-Lopez confirms the secret ingredient is hip-hop.
“We were listening to these old hip-hop records that we hadn’t listened to in years. You know these bangers where you kind of nod your head and tap your foot? I like the feeling of a lot of these songs. A lot of hip-hop songs have that. That was one of the ways that hip-hop influenced Getting Paid. We liked that swing, that groove,” he says in a phone interview.
Zechs Marquise new full length album “Getting Paid” out on September 27, 2011 on Rodriguez Lopez Productions. Don’t miss them on Tour all Summer with RX Bandits and Maps & Atlases.
As cliché as it is, a sophomore slump is a relatively valid fear for artist and fan alike But given the pedigree of Zechs Marquise, the fear diminishes quite a bit. Featuring Marcel and Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez (the former of Mars Volta fame), the El Paso, TX outfit will release their second album Getting Paid on September 27th via Rodriguez-Lopez Productions. They’ve even invited brother and fellow Volta bandmate Rikardo Rodriguez-Lopez to join in on keyboard trumpet for this go-around.
The first track to surface from the forthcoming album is “Everlasting Beacon of Light,” a dense, layered track that expands on the bands hazy, aggressive prog stylings of 2009′s Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare. The offering has almost a trip-hop feel to it as it builds up and finally explodes with the wrecking ball intensity we’ve come to love from the Brothers Rodriguez. Check out the song and the full tracklist to Getting Paid below.
Getting Paid Tracklist: 01. Getting Paid 02. Lock Jaw Night Vision 03. Static Lovers 04. The Heat, The Drought, The Thirst, and The Insanity 05. Time Masters 06. Guajira 07. Everlasting Beacon of Light 08. Crushin’ It! 09. Mega Slap
Rodriguez Lopez Productions and Sargent House presents the Pick any 4 Vinyl for only $40 and or 4 CDs for only $20 includes some great new and old titles. This will only be through September and while supplies last. Support our album / vinyl making habit. It does the karma good.
Thrusting listeners into chase scenes through psychedelic dreamscapes is nothing new for El Paso prog rock instrumentalists Zechs Marquise. However, the major difference on their latest album, “Getting Paid” (out Tuesday on Rodriguez Lopez Productions via Sargent House), isn’t the fear of being chased, but of what’s running up behind you.
Through the incorporation of boom bap beats and sci-fi funk, the images of creepy, red-eyed specters haunting their first album, “Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare,” have been replaced by ‘70s mobsters, Kung Fu assassins and gun-toting Willie Dynamite lookalikes.
And while it’s not hard to see where Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez and his brothers Marcel and Rikardo garner much of their influence (their older brother is psych rock demigod Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of The Mars Volta), “Getting Paid” adds more concise rhythmic formulas into their Latin-spiked jam band roots.
It makes sense when you consider their longtime friendships and cross pollinations in the underground L.A. beat scene with artists like DJ Nobody, Daedelus and Busdriver. So much so that the news that they’ll be holding their album release party Wednesday as part of the Low End Theory at the Airliner seems like a natural choice.
Imagine a soundtrack for a blaxploitation film starring Shaft in outer space and you’ll have an idea of what Zechs Marquise’s second album, Getting Paid, sounds like. The album is a harder, funkier successor to the group’s full-length debut Our Delicate Stranded Nightmare, which favored ambience and mellow dub.
I spoke with bassist Marfred Rodriguez-Lopez over the phone about the album as well as a number of other topics including why the band is playing at a strip club in Hollywood, bass lines in latin cumbias and west coast hip-hop, Japanese anime, the period of time the band was named Mastodon, and a certain famous sibling.
