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CD Review
Aside from the expected guitar and drum-driven precision freakouts of “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore,” (the “Pisacis (Phra-Men-Ma)” segment sounds like a leaner-not-meaner Black Sabbath) and the coffee-on-the-lap jolt of opener “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus,” much of Frances is The Mars Volta committed—pumped full of lithium, they’re left to blather in the lobotomized void of a comfortable chair while Floydian “Echoes” drift through the sterilized asylum halls. Dust scatters and sparkles in the sunlight as “The Widow”’s wrinkled hands slump onto a long-neglected window sill. Staring out of a smudged window towards the children outside, she feels a loneliness that’s more easily shared with the masses. Horns paint a canvas of clay-covered shacks amid banana trees and punctuate the desolate solitude she faces, preferring death to a lonely life in an empty bed.Like the “Widow,” “L’Via L’Viaquez” is more accessible: alternating slow, psychotic tango interludes with head-banging bass and a funky guitar vamp, it almost fits into a square funk-rock hole, but The Mars Volta’s pegs are too jigsawed and jagged to fit neatly anywhere. The song closes as birds chirp innocently in the background, but something gently sinister lurks beyond the spacey voids of Frances the Mute. As “Miranda…” begins, “that ghost” sings eerily atop hollow atmospherics and falling dream emptiness. Flea’s spooky trumpet melody cuts the nauseous suspense, but “Cassandra Gemini” won’t forget that “No there’s no light.” Frances lurks behind the sheer veil between that darkness and the sparks of frenetic guitar flashing on the other side. Strings and horns give a warm ambient glow to the album’s series of waking dreams, and the songs’ dark surrealism is disturbingly close to the drab reality of everyday consciousness. Frances the Mute calls forth images of ecstatic blood-stained faces and withered, skinless corpses writhing in a sea of bills, laughing as they drown to death in a see of their own greed.Is it prog? Sure. Abstract? Yeah. Rock? Definitely. Definable? Not by me. Go dig up Pablo if that’s what you’re looking for. The Mars Volta’s confidence and self-awareness dare anyone to tell them what they are, and those who appreciate them will like it better that way. Frances the Mute is way too big to fit within the semantic confines of rock and roll, but by forcing it, rock and roll itself is expanded, and thank God for that. For more info see: themarsvolta.com
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In one of his more generous comments about rock critics, Frank Zappa said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” The Mars Volta prove the bastard right. A controlled mess of flawless paradox, Frances the Mute is more suited to poetry than prose. Picasso could probably handle it. The evocative but non-sensical lyrics and genre juxtapositions of The Mars Volta’s new album defy both categorization and description.
