Take a few minutes to reacquaint yourself with the “One Armed Scissor” video. The one shown on MTV, the late night performances, any will do. This was how most of the world was introduced to At the Drive In, and every time, the El Paso band was presented as the most exciting shit imaginable in 2000: the explosive intraband dynamic, their acrobatic musicality, the barely controlled violence of their live performances, the afros. Meanwhile, their first piece of new music since Relationship of Command was premiered with a video that focuses solely on the two things that make At the Drive In seem kinda ridiculous in 2017: the lyrics and their artwork. “Governed by Contagions” maintains a kind of vestigial potency on account of sounding instantly recognizable as At the Drive In, which is true of in•ter a•li•a as well. But just as often, there’s the sense that time has diminished that power, and much like the vanished hyphen in their name and the replacement of Jim Ward with another member of Sparta, the subtractions are as subtle as they are undeniable.
in•ter a•li•a doesn’t exactly pick up where Relationship of Command left off; it just imagines if ATDI continued to coexist alongside the side projects it spawned, like a carton of milk absorbing the odors around it. “Call Broken Arrow” and “Torrentially Cutshaw” are *Relationship of Command *deep cuts refracted through the groove-oriented Antemasque and the stylized psychedelia of Bosnian Rainbows, while “Incurably Innocent” has a third-gen emo edge that could be sourced from guitarist Keeley Davis’ former band Engine Down. Meanwhile, “Governed by Contagions” imagines an inverted trajectory of ATDI, as if they were actually a fusion of the Mars Volta’s hammiest operatics and Sparta’s rigid alt-rock. “Thaaaat’s the way the guillotine claps,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala sings, punctuated by a gimmicky handclap and the swift liquidation of any goodwill generated by their 2016 return.
Hearing it as the fourth track on in•ter a•li•a doesn’t make a good song, but while almost four minutes of slightly off-brand At the Drive In is a massive disappointment in the context of 2017 and Relationship of Command, after 41 minutes, it’s easier to accept what in•ter a•li•a brings to the present day when no one else sounds anything like them. And when Bixler-Zavala’s language is the only one being spoken, it’s easier to meet him on his own incomprehensible terms. At the Drive In’s dispatches on shadow governments, mind-crime operations, and cloak-and-dagger espionage remains resonant like most prog of its kind, even when littered with obvious buzzwords like “bourgeoisie” and “chemtrails.”
In a rare instance of verbal candor, Bixler-Zavala has explained his intent to place in•ter a•li•a firmly within 2017: the writing process drew on the instability of the Korean peninsula, parenthood, his wife’s trauma from sexual assault, and possibly Daniel Holtzclaw, an Oklahoma police officer serving life in prison for multiple counts of rape. These are sensitive topics and so Bixler-Zavala’s puzzle-master approach to writing is reasonable. But what exactly are lines like “Smuggled in their faith like an orbit in decay/drools the cloying adulation of the pissants,” or, “Caving the symptom of confessional/Into the licorice forgery/And she dogged the seduction subdued by The Handmaid's Tale” trying to get across? Though it’ll be given a more serious reading than anything on a Mars Volta album, Bixler-Zavala’s verbal indulgences express little more than its own prolificacy, adding distance and distraction rather than depth.
Once again, this isn’t a terribly different approach than what came before; in fact, the band went to great lengths to take the same approach, revisiting old books, movies and even mixtapes to enter the mindset they had while creating Relationship of Command. But when ATDI careened with the same scatterbrained urgency as Bixler-Zavala’s lyrics, their mania cohered into a worldview that could be understood on a gut level. No revelation came immediately: What would “Arcarsenal” be if it didn’t have its 50-second intro or the piano on the bridge? What if “Pattern Against User” lost its tropical punk asides? What about the bridge on “One Armed Scissor” or the a cappella whispering in “Invalid Litter Dept.”? They would probably fit right in on in•ter a•li•a, which only rocks as if bound by duty: the guitars are loud, the tempos are up, and most songs can be momentarily confused for, say, “Cosmonaut.” But even though they’ve spent almost two decades maligning the Andy Wallace and Ross Robinson mix that allowed Relationship of Command to compete with nu-metal on alt-rock playlists, the stiff and textureless sound of Rich Costey's Muse-honed production aesthetic will only help ATDI sound like a fit with the metalcore titans Of Mice & Men and Memphis May Fire that they can now call their labelmates.
It’s tempting to play armchair psychologist and say the lack of stakes or risk inherent in in•ter a•li•a is just the inevitable result of this being an ATDI album where everyone seems to enjoy each other’s company; or, the natural outgrowth of a well-received reunion tour that wasn’t tainted by the band’s own claims of it being a nostalgic cash grab. At the Drive In engaging in fan service is understandable, but they arrived at this point by always having something to push against. Earlier in their career, it was the struggle to be noticed in a notoriously blighted city, and later it would be the limitations of their sound or the stagnancy of rock radio, and certainly against each other. While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.
