History, as they say, repeats itself. The Mars Volta's ambitious new release, "Frances the Mute," is a history lesson of sorts - not that it sounds exactly like any one particular album you've heard before. In fact, it may very well turn out to be the craziest thing you've heard in a long while, as The Mars Volta offer up their perplexing contribution to the canon of classic rock. They are, however, a schizophrenic jumble of a number of things you've heard before, but pieced together in a five-song Zepplin-like epic that leaves you reeling and feeling somehow ... bruised.
To put it more simply, imagine having a nightmare involving blackened lungs and crawling maggots, to the soundtrack of Radiohead's "O.K Computer" mixed with Metallica's "Black Album," with a demonic Robert Plant singing above the screeching guitars and psychotic trumpets. And there you have "Frances the Mute." The whole thing is overwrought, overdramatic and overwhelmingly unsettling. But it sure is interesting. The album was either composed between bong hits or over the course of a demon exorcism ... I'm guessing both activities were somehow involved.
Conveniently sorted under the label of prog-rock, the Mars Volta are actually some kind of funky assortment of metal, classic rock, post-punk and salsa. The band's two members split from punk band At The Drive-In in order to pursue the Mars Volta project, and "Frances the Mute" is their second full-length album.
Singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala howls in both English and Spanish - in neither case are his lyrics really comprehensible, but my lyric booklet tells me he's singing things like, "She can bat a broken eyelid/raining maggots from it's sty/and with the traces that she leaves/she will skin you out alive" in the four-part song "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore," and growling the words "there was frail syrup dripping off his lap dances lapel/punctuated by her decrepit prowl/she washed down the hatching gizzard soft as a mane of needles" in the five-part song, "Cassandra Geminni."
Bixler-Zavala's guitarist friend Omar Rodriguez-Lopez runs wild with the guitar solos, often with terrifying results - they tend to jump out at you from the quieter, eerier moments - and then you feel like you're in some video game where you step into a room to find a giant scorpion bad-guy waiting to consume you. For the most part, the many-segmented songs are divided up based on Rodriguez-Lopez's alternations between scathing riffs and floating, haunting melodies, both of which often disintegrate into periods of acid-jazz psychedelia.
At times they drag on for too long, but the duo gets it just right on the third track - the twelve-minute long "L'Via L'Viaquez" - an explosive salsa-inspired rock masterpiece that jumps back and forth from metal-fuelled guitar romps to funky latin beats. "The Widow" is probably the only track of conventional length and construction, in which Bixler-Zavala sings from the perspective of some haunted widow figure who eerily repeats: "I hear him every night in every pore and every time he just makes me warm."
"Frances the Mute" is not exactly a sprawling concept album, it's more like a combination of four epic songs that aspire to the greatest heights of rock grandeur, with "The Widow" thrown in there somewhere to give you a bit of a rest from the general assault.
