After the short opener “Son et Lumière”, this is the first full-length song on De-Loused In The Comatorium, one of the most powerful and adventurous rock albums of its era. There is no break or transition between “Son et Lumière” and “Inertiatic ESP”, and the two songs have often been performed live as a single item.
Based on a short story written by vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and sound manipulation artist Jeremy Ward, the album tells the story of a man named Cerpin Taxt, lying in a comatose state and hallucinating from an overdose of morphine and rat poison.
The lyrics are opaque and filled with symbolism and drug-induced verbosity. Cedric has admitted that some of his lyrics simply come out in the moment; emotions he tried to capture in words in the recordings. From: https://genius.com/The-mars-volta-inertiatic-esp-lyrics
At The Drive-In had already pushed post-hardcore in a more progressive direction on their final pre-reunion album, 2000’s immortal Relationship of Command, but when vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodríguez-López started their next band The Mars Volta, they went full-on prog, and pretty much became the first post-hardcore band to do so this blatantly. The energy and volume of their previous band still informed the songwriting on The Mars Volta’s 2003 debut LP De-Loused in the Comatorium, but so did the mind-melting prog riffage of King Crimson and the psychedelic Latin jazz-rock freakouts of Santana. The Mars Volta almost singlehandedly introduced the influence of those bands into the contemporary punk scene, and they did them justice too. This wasn’t a case of imitation; De-Loused in the Comatorium felt as groundbreaking in 2003 as In the Court of the Crimson King and Abraxas did three decades earlier, and like those albums, it still sounds timeless today. Cedric had already honed his singing voice by Relationship of Command, but he was belting it on this album in a way you never would’ve guessed he could in the ATDI days. Likewise, Omar was fleshing Relationship of Command out with dizzying lead guitar, but on this album he’s a straight-up guitar hero. And matching the over-the-top prog of the instrumentation is the fact that it’s lyrically a concept album based on an accompanying short story about a man who overdoses and enters a coma. The whole thing is as excessive and flashy as ’70s rock ever get, but it still hits as hard as Cedric and Omar did in their previous lives as hardcore kids. The Mars Volta would get more progressive and less post-hardcore as their career went on, but De-Loused will always remain one of the first, best, and truest examples of 21st century progressive post-hardcore. From: https://www.brooklynvegan.com/listen-to-the-mars-voltas-previously-unheard-early-version-of-inertiatic-esp/
