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Since releasing the Magnetic Fields' seventh album, i, in 2004, Stephin Merritt has dabbled in musical theater with Showtunes and scored the audiobooks for Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler's A Series of Unfortunate Events kid-lit series (under the name the Gothic Archies). Maybe the offbeat side projects explain his unexpected interest in rock.

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Problema número uno: The Mars Volta no longer have the services of superhumanly hard-swinging drummer Jon Theodore, who kept even their knottiest epics grounded in the hips as well as the head -- no small feat for a band determined to fill every millisecond with notes, beats, sound effects, or Cedric Bixler-Zavala's often inchoate howl.

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Turns out, there's a lot to be said for dancing on Pol Pot's grave. In 2005, these Los Angeles-based rockers made history as the first Westerners to tour Cambodia since the dictator's bloody regime, and that triumph lends a visceral confidence to their third album.