At the Drive-In
Relationship of Command
Grand Royal Records
Produced by Ross Robinson
Mixed by Andy Wallace

At the Drive-In's final record begins with the sound of something boiling over. Even for a band that had created the swirling and broken catharsis of the anthemic "Initiation" and the prickly but beautiful lament "Lopsided," it's immediately obvious from the first few seconds of "Arcarsenal" that At the Drive-In are onto some next shit on Relationship of Command.

Or at least, I imagine that's how it would be if you were hearing it after hearing all their other albums, but I, like many other listeners, came to At the Drive-In's last album with fresh ears. Familiarity with their earlier work, as well as with singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's later work in The Mars Volta, has only expanded and deepened my appreciation for what they achieved on Relationship of Command, an album that has come to be an all-time favorite and a touchstone—the band's swan song, but also a siren song.

As it is with many great collaborations, At the Drive-In's greatest strength was the tension within the band. Born from hardcore and punk, the band as constituted for their third full-length album found itself being pulled in two directions: guitarist and second vocalist Jim Ward, drummer Tony Hajjar and bassist Paul Hinojos were grounded in the anthemic aspects of punk, while Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez were straining to pull in more aspects of psychedelia and prog rock. After their breakup in 2001, the former trio's inclinations would lead them to found the emo-friendly Sparta, while the latter's would lead them down into the ever-widening spiral of jam-heaviness that is The Mars Volta. Both of those acts has their merits; neither has the power of At the Drive-In.

That power doesn't derive simply from tension—the component keys to At the Drive-In's magic are (roughly): a tremendous ear for melody across all the instruments in the band, a skull-splitting intensity of purpose and drive, a sick mix of moving parts within each song with no respect for the sanctity of any individual part, a love of sonic texture and expansion, and Bixler-Zavala's lyrics.

The lyrics might be the last thing you notice, simply because they're a.) abstract, confusing, and often nonsensical and b.) often overwhelmed by the ferocity of the music. But they're nevertheless the key to putting all the musical parts of At the Drive-In in context. After the boiling shaker that opens the record is subsumed by a relentless tom roll, a dizzying and piercing guitar cackle, and vast mountains of menacing low-register bass, the first verse that hits you drips with regret and warning, but damned if you can tell exactly what Bixler-Zavala's on about:

I must have read a thousand faces
I must have robbed them of their cause
Sickened thirst, sickened thirst
keeps it together
Soft white glow in the cranium
A bull's eye made sedated

And then Bixler-Zavala's repeated caution, screamed at the top of his lungs: Beware! It reads like the found poetry at the end of a spam e-mail, or maybe the result of a game of Exquisite Corpse played by some particularly unstable people. It always seems at least a bit unfair to strip lyrics from their music backing and just drop them on the page, but this is doubly true with Bixler-Zavala's lyrics because it's not so much what he's saying but how he's saying it that says something.