At the Drive-In - Relationship of Command
(Grand Royal - 2000)
Shit. What can you really say about ATDI? "Timeless" gets thrown around a lot to represent bands or albums that were simply exemplary for their time and genre. For example, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden are amazing bands - but there were a million shittier bands like them during the 1980s. There simply is no equivalent for ATDI in any era. The closest one would be Fugazi. That's some fucking serious company. 'Relationship of Command' was completely outside all other genres when it was released in 2000. It's high-energy and catchy, but it's anything but cliche. It holds to proven hardcore punk ascetics while moving into more atmospheric and noisy territory with electronic augmentation.
So you flip on the radio in 2000 and get Limp Bizkit, Godsmack, Green Day (yeah, still) and then "One Armed Scissor" comes on. Completely fucking insane. The Beastie Boys' Grand Royal records did music fans across the globe a huge favor when they pushed ATDI as hard as they did. Because of this, fans everywhere (myself included) who had become more and more alienated from mainstream music as the decade progressed were exposed to underground music that had held on to its ideals and continued to evolve in the shadow of the machine.
'Relationship of Command' involves the listener on a visceral level. It moves from completely saturating the brain with instruments moving in every direction to placing the listener into a vulnerable space that, while quieter, is no less chaotic. The beginning and end of the record represent this polarity exactly: "Arcasenal" is a sensory overload and "Non-Zero Possibility" is what empty space must sound like. Over the course of the record the band oscillates between these two extremes both delightfully and unpredictably. Lyrically, the record is completely schizophrenic. It seems to be way more important that there are words there and how those words are presented than the actual semantic content of the words themselves. Naysayers will claim any idiot can make up gibberish lyrics and sound good, and to that I say Sigur Ros, or "bullshit" in English.
The one thing ATDI did that was absolutely right, as much as it sucks to say, was make this their last record. There is no way any band could follow this up. It seems most of our modern legends know when their legacy is sealed, when it is time to throw in the towel while the fire is still smoldering (Botch and Himsa being others that come to mind). Sure, the members of ATDI went on to release some really quality albums as The Mars Volta and Sparta, and a responsibility of being in a truly awesome band is to explode it into several other awesome bands, but having all those elements masterfully blended on one disc was truly special. "Quarantined" is a paradigm of the experimentalism that The Mars Volta embodies mixed with Sparta's raw force, and it is a formula that has since been lost to the faithful alchemists trying to replicate it.
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