Gatekeeping vs Gatewaying

"If This Ever Gets Weird" & "Perverts"

Last weekend my friend and Ferrn bandmate Jonathan Mondragon came over to our apartment to watch the documentary Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird. The doc concerns the musical careers of Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, two musicians most famous for their joint membership in the post-hardcore band At The Drive-In and the progressive rock band The Mars Volta. Jon and I (along with Frank “Friend of Music” Meadows) recorded two podcasts about The Mars Volta so we were both easy marks for this movie. Even still, and even cut by my typical middling expectations for rockumentary, If This Ever Gets Weird was terrific. Assembled almost entirely out of Rodriguez-Lopez’s home footage, as well as the best quality live footage of The Mars Volta you’ve ever seen, Omar and Cedric is a must watch for any fan of either of their bands. It is also a touching portrait of a love between two men, as friends and collaborators, strong enough to endure the trials of extreme drug use, the tribulations of the music industry, and the ire of the Church of Scientology. While it is by no means the complete story given how many band members are not interviewed and how many are no longer present to be interviewed, it is as definitive a statement as we’ve yet received about the history of one of the best bands of the 21st century.

Omar and Cedric is organized into three sections, the first concerning the duo’s early childhood and At The Drive-In, the second the first decade of the The Mars Volta, and the third about their personal lives in the interregnum before The Mars Volta reunited in 2022. Given my recent writing about the dangers of audience capture, I was struck by a pair of moments at the end of the first section and the beginning of the second. Omar and Cedric both receive At The Drive-In’s success following Relationship of Command with hostile ambivalence. Neither are happy that the crowds packing out there shows are filled with white dudes intent on slam dancing. When the duo decide to start The Mars Volta Rodriguez-Lopez’s first ground rule is that the band must “honor [their] roots”, i.e. draw from the Puerto Rican, Mexican, and broadly Latin American music that they grew up with even and especially if it alienated the jocks drawn to the nü-metal friendly sonics of Command. Once The Mars Volta are up and running Bixler-Zavala remarks on the effectiveness of this gatekeeping over footage the band shredding a Mexico City audience within inches of their lives, concluding that “the weirdos won”.

January is a typically slow month for new music chatter. In the months before the year’s primary talking points emerge wretched out of their digital eggs, it’s easy for a single record to chomp down on all of the juiciest worms. Perverts, the latest 90 minute long “EP” from Ethel Cain has been 2025’s early bird. It’s plumage; all black. I first heard Cain when ~*My Girlfriend*~ put her 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter on in the car last year as we were driving around Chicago before I moved back. I’m not too proud to admit that like a lot of people I said of Cain’s music at the time “kinda sounds like Lana Del Rey”¹. Perverts does *not* sound like Lana Del Rey. Perverts sounds like something that would come out on The Flenser, Thrill Jockey, Sacred Bones, or even Enemies List. Roughly an EP’s worth of the material featured on Perverts follows logically from the spacious, sad pop of Preacher’s Daughter, though with more droning distortion than I recall from that drive along Kedzie Street. The rest of Perverts is completely inhospitable to pop sensibilities, leaving space for ambient noise, horror movie foley, wordless post rock, and an atmosphere of dread too thick for consumer grade kitchen wear to scratch.

The conversation around Perverts has thus far centered around its capacity to alienate the mainstream pop audience Ethel Cain was steadily accruing. It is certainly the kind of album that you make when you’re not concerned with a repeat appearance on Barack Obama’s personal playlist. I have no doubt that Cain wouldn’t mind scaring off some of the light-weight pop fans with higher expectations of para-social access. As with The Mars Volta, Ethel Cain is right to weed out people from her audience who don’t get what she’s after. Setting boundaries, either physical or aesthetic, is a healthy thing. After all, we need only look at the recent news stories about Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer to see the worst possible outcome of artists mingling too closely with their admirers. I’d much rather musicians be standoffish and aloof if that meant fewer fans got hurt.

However, I’m more interested in the Ethel Cain fans that stick around. What about the listeners that treat this not as an act of gatekeeping but as the opening of a gateway into a deeper and more interesting world of music? As a young white guy with a taste for aggressive rock, my exposure to The Mars Volta forced me to elevate my taste. I went out searching for more progressive rock and jazz fusion from the 1970s. Year by year I grew more interested in music from Latin & South America and developed a deep appreciation for avant garde improvisational traditions or the unconventional producing practices of dub and noise artists. I may have gotten into all the stuff had I not had my mind blown by “Cassandra Gemini”, but it’s hard to say for sure. I’m excited for the young, eager-eared fans of Ethel Cain that rise to the challenge presented by Perverts. Here’s their chance to dig into the catalogs of Grouper, Felicia Atkinson, Anna Von Hausswolf, and so on. Maybe some of them will even get into Gregor Samsa. To those daughters of Cain freshly initiated into the Weird Stuff, welcome to the dark side.

# # # # # The Promo Zone # # # # #

• People Places Records, the label that put out my last album The Lonely Atom, released a new compilation earlier this week featuring 22 brand new tunes to raise funds for the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation. Due to my recent loss of most of my demos my personal cupboards were too bare for me to submit anything to the compilation in time, however I’m lucky enough to say that my data loss was a result of my own manageable stupidity rather than neighborhood-leveling wildfires. I’m proud to support People Places’ mission from the sidelines however, and I encourage all of you to support this compilation by grabbing a copy below.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently! You can find a Spotify playlist with all of this year’s tracks here, updated with a new song every Monday-Friday.

“Language is A Virus from Outer Space” by Laurie Anderson (United States Live, 1984)

I’ve been working my way through Laurie Anderson’s United States Live incrementally for the last few weeks. The early part of the year is a great time to tackle big, demanding projects. That’s how I ended up reading War & Peace with my old book club last year. Despite its length, United States Live isn’t as challenging as all that. Heck, it’s pretty funny by design. Though it’s more of an abstract radio drama than an album of music, the occasional live band tunes like this groovy, brassy, jam are a blast.

“Baile Inolvidable” by Bad Bunny (Debí Tirar Más Fotos, 2025)

Outside of Ethel Cain, the other major subject of conversation in month one of 2025 has been Bad Bunny’s ethnographically informed ode to Puerto Rico, Debi Tirar Más Fotos. I’ve been impressed with Bad Bunny’s ability to glide between different genres since his 2018 debut full length, but Fotos might be his most ambitious act of genre-fusion yet, synthesizing multiple generations of Puerto Rican music history into a single encompassing vision. Having spent the last year dipping my toe into the vast archive of rad salsa records from the 1970s, I was particularly susceptible to the charms of this throwback track.

“Fanfare for a Heartfelt Love” by Bedsore (Dreaming the Strife for Love, 2024)

Proof that prog works just as well in a sprint as it does in a marathon. In Phil Freeman’s review of Dreaming the Strife for Love for The Shuffle he compares Bedsore to Van Der Graaf Generator. That comparison feels most apt here, where the Italian death-metalers-gone-prog evoke the terrific “Theme One” from Pawn Hearts. Except since Bedsore are still, sorta, kinda a death metal band at heart, their rendition is significantly more *evil*. I’ll have more to say about this record soon!

“The Most Unwanted Song” by Komar & Melamid and Dave Soldier (The People’s Choice Music, 1997)

I mentioned this experiment to ~*MGF*~ recently and she said she hadn’t heard of it, so I’m guessing that some of you reading might not have heard of this either. Basic idea is that some data guys did a study to determine what elements in music people most wanted to hear and most wanted to avoid. Then they wrote songs based on that data. The a-side says more about the state of adult contemporary music in 1997 than anything objective about music, but the b-side is like nothing else on earth. Every music fan with a taste for The Weird Stuff will have at least one moment during this track where they must reckon with the possibility that it SLAPS. It is at the very least a product of excellent comedic timing.

“Banning Paragliding” by bagel fanclub (Encore County Ground, 2024)

Shouts out to John from Ferrn for putting me onto this one. This whole record is wall-to-wall breakbeat insanity, but I appreciate that this track starts closer to big beat territory before going totally bonkers. At heart I am still a 13 y/o wearing cheap sunglasses imagining myself cartwheeling through a lobby littered with bullet holes. Embrace your Matrix fantasy before the cascade of drums comes to bury it.

\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /

Here are five micro reviews of albums from my vast Rate Your Music catalog. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.

Part the Second by maudlin of the Well (2009) - Progressive Rock

One of the earliest examples I can recall of a band crowd-funding an album, with the added weight of this being both a reunion and a final word by the band. At the time I knew that as a music forum dweller I was supposed to like this band, but until this album dropped I never gave them a shot. While I can’t speak to how this relates to the rest of their work, I’m happy to sing the praises of this record on its own terms. Generously arranged, these songs are full of counter melodies across instruments, build to their catharsis patiently, and focus on depth of feeling instead of its heights. Imbued with gorgeous strings, off kilter rhythms, and jazz harmony this album is a must listen for fans of the King Crimson wing of prog rock. It isn’t perfect though, despite starting and ending strong the middle section can feel like abstraction for the sake of it.

The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden (1982) - Heavy Metal

Maiden’s first album with Bruce Dickinson raises the thorny question of whether an album can be justifiably called a classic if most of the record is merely fine (and sometimes outright bad) but also contains two of the hands down best metal songs ever. My love for ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name” and the title track is just deep enough for me to endure the schlocky tracks that surround them. “The Prisoner” and “Children of the Damned” are pretty cool too. I hardly ever listen to this record all the way through, but its status in metal history makes it an undeniable must-listen. Just skip the opening track.

Somewhere In Time by Iron Maiden (1986) - Heavy Metal

As of this moment, my favorite Iron Maiden record. The introduction of synths and the chorus’d out guitar tone give this one a beautiful sci-fi sheen. All of the songs are good, even the unintentionally hilarious “Alexander the Great” is a joy to listen to. It’s just prog enough, has huge hooks around every corner and features the best drumming of any Maiden album until Brave New World. Makes me grin ear to ear for an hour straight.

Discipline by King Crimson (1981) - Progressive Rock

I first heard this in the Berklee College of Music library when I did a summer program there as a teen. King Crimson’s first album after resurrecting themselves as a New Wave band, proving once again that punk didn’t kill prog, it only made it stronger. Adrian Blew gets to be a real weirdo on the mic, Robert Fripp pushes his lead guitar into barely recognizable shapes, and Levin & Buford groove their asses off. The title track must have launched a thousand polyrhythmic imitators all by itself. The other stand out is “Frame by Frame”, a surprisingly pretty song that still features some outrageous performances. One of the coolest reinventions in rock history.

Paranoid by Black Sabbath (1970) - Heavy Metal

Imagine getting to band practice, setting up your drums, and sitting down when your guitarist, Tony Iommi, walks in, says “hey guys, got a new idea for a tune” and plays for its first audience ever the main riff to “Iron Man”. Just take a second to consider how fucking hype you’d be. This is the only way to appreciate an album as ubiquitous as Paranoid. You have to remember that every note of each of these iconic songs was written by a human being and not carved into the face of reality itself by the Titans. Sabbath’s debut was the flash of metal’s lightning across the sky but Paranoid was its resounding thunder. Every millisecond of this album has been mined for entire careers worth of metal concepts. And incredibly, the songs still slap to this day.

1. Not an insult, to be clear. Let the record show that this is a pro-Lana newsletter.