Personnel: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, John Frusciante (guitar); Mark Aanderud (piano); Isaiah "Ikey" Owens (keyboards); Marcel Rodriguez Lopez (synthesizer); Juan Alderete De La Pena (bass instrument); Thomas Pridgen (drums).

Audio Mixer: Rich Costey.

Recording information: Sutton St., Brooklyn, NY (08/2008).

Arranger: Omar Rodriguez-Lopez.

For punk, metal or hard rock bands, the unplugged album is the one that shows whether they've been succeeding simply on energy and volume, or because of real talent. (Anyone who remained a skeptic of Kurt Cobain's songwriting skills must have been converted by Nirvana's MTV UNPLUGGED masterpiece.) And OCTAHEDRON, a quieter and more subdued Mars Volta album, proves that same fact for a band that's perpetually lived on a knife's edge of tension. Recorded in less than a month, OCTAHEDRON is by no means an unplugged album--it's not acoustic, it's not confined to ballads, and includes consecutive hard rockers in "Cotopaxi" and "Desperate Graves"--but it charts a different direction for the group, and proves they don't need to shuttle between dynamic extremes in order to succeed on an artistic level.