The Mars Volta has become my addiction. Throughout the day I am haunted by its melodies, I fall fast asleep to its lyrical weeping and wake up with it ringing in my ears.

The Mars Volta was formed several years ago by two founding members of At The Drive-In, arguably the most popular underground band of all time. Cedric Zavala, vocals, and Omar Rodriguez, electric guitar, were bored of the music they had been playing and wanted to experiment with something more than the post-punk vision that ATDI seemed stuck in. Rodriguez compared his last months with At The Drive-In to “sleeping with someone you’re no longer in love with.”

The solution to that dissatisfaction is The Mars Volta’s new album De-Loused in the Comatorium. De-Loused is a concept album inspired by the life and death of Julio Venegas, an artist from El Paso, Texas, and a friend of the band. Venegas lived a life of drugs and alcohol that scarred his body and gave him the nickname “Frankenstein.” He tried to escape his horrible life by shooting rat poison into his veins. He survived, but the incident shriveled his arm and put him into a coma. In 1996, Venegas jumped off of a bridge into rush-hour traffic while ATDI was practicing and died.

Rodriguez and Zavala were so moved by his tragically poetic life and death that they devoted an entire album to him. All of the songs are based on a story written by Zavala and starring a character named Cerpin Taxt. The eight tracks allow the listener to experience 60 minutes of a fantastic voyage into the various levels of Taxt’s troubled subconscious during his coma and witness the cosmic battle between good and evil for his soul.

The album is unlike anything I have ever heard before. Imagine taking Led Zepplin, Santana, Stevie Rae Vaugn and Jimi Hendrix and fusing them with trance-techno and the hard progressive post-punk of European bands and you have just scratched the surface of The Mars Volta experience.

The Latin beat created by a frenzy of bongos is intoxicating, while the guitars and vocals are driving and lead you from genre to genre on your auditory adventure. In a second, the musical anarchy melts away into sultry riffs where each halting note is caressed, stroked and plucked with all the passion of a tormented lover. The Mars Volta have created a morbid, twisted, haunting and inspiring album that offers a phantasmagoria of realities and nightmares. It transports you to that place in your subconscious in between sleep and life.

Along with the Latin influence comes a vast array of otherworldly sound distortions including pulsing waves, whale calls, helicopters, water dripping and ambulance sirens. These everyday sounds morph into something very different – the voice crying in the night, haunting you in your dreams.

The band has effectively created an elaborate dream world where things are not as they appear and suddenly transform into something different right in front of your eyes. The album fittingly seems like the soundtrack of your life and the background music of your feverish dreams.

For an hour you will lose yourself in the music and forget everything else while being transported to an extraterrestrial planet. Zavala’s voice, ethereal and haunting, leads you to the surface of this mystery that they have so passionately created.

It is unlikely that you will hear any songs from this album on the radio. All traditional lines are blurred with one and a half minute instrumental introductions and 12 minute songs that melt into each other without a clear break making it unclear where one song ends and another begins.

This album must be heard. It calls out to listeners. It demands to be heard. It cannot be easily dismissed or forgotten, but sticks with you throughout the day, haunting you with its melodies.

Listening to the album was described by Fader magazine as, “akin to swimming in a lake at night, alternately terrifying and spiritual and primordially sexual.”

I don’t care what kind of music you think you like or don’t like.

De-Loused in the Comatorium could possibly be the most important album to be released in our time.