Mars Volta “Frances the Mute”
Universal
An innocuous guitar gradually invades the air as a disembodied
voice croons a soft verse. Suddenly the situation spirals out of
control into an explosion of white noise, beckoning listeners into
a macabre landscape of manifested nightmares. So begins
“Frances the Mute,” The Mars Volta’s sophomore
effort. At 77 minutes in length, “Frances” may have
multiple tracks, but in reality it is a behemoth meant to be heard
as one cohesive work. The idea for “Frances the Mute”
came from a journal that The Mars Volta’s former sound
engineer, the late Jeremy Ward, found in a car while working as a
mechanic. The journal portrays a man piecing together his past, and
each song is named for a person in this mysterious tome. Knowing
this fact makes listening to the album a rather surreal experience.
While there is no sure definition of what the lyrics mean, the
album presents disturbing images and situations. Themes of rape,
murder and church corruption are abundant. The album opens with the
sonic assault of “Cygnus … Vismund Cygnus,” which
jumps from thunderous guitars and machine-gun vocals to spacey jams
by guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and ear-shattering wails by
Zavala. As “Cygnus” fades out to sounds of cars and
traffic, “The Widow” begins with Zavala’s
haunting voice taking center stage. “The Widow” and its
accompanying video have recently received heavy airplay both on the
radio and television. Reminiscent of a hard-edged power ballad,
“The Widow” is the album’s most accessible song,
with its well-timed use of a horn giving it a bone-chilling climax.
Following “The Widow” is the inventive Spanish-language
song “L’Via L’Viaquez.” As the lead guitar
crashes in at the start, the song sounds reminiscent of a Santana
track. Then, as the Spanish vocals kick in and the song evolves
into a slow salsa jam, the eccentric complexity of the album
develops further. After “L’Via” comes the
album’s only major misstep, as it takes five minutes of noise
for the fourth song, “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t
Holy Anymore,” to begin. A few minutes of birds chirping is
OK from a thematic standpoint, but a solid five minutes of
cacophony takes it too far. “Miranda” is the most
foreboding song on the album, at times sounding like a funeral
march and others a horror movie soundtrack. The use of a horn
section imbues a grandiose majesty punctuated by the explosion of
the song’s final chorus. The closing song, “Cassandra
Gemini,” is a 32-minute epic so sprawling that it had to be
cut into eight tracks. However, The Mars Volta manages to make
their jaw-dropping half-hour song sound seamless as it moves from
track to track. Beginning with a synthesized spoken-word soliloquy,
“Cassandra” detonates into a frenzy of piercing vocals
and thumping beats. The song then progresses into various
movements, among them random jams and off-tempo verses.
Unfortunately, this song is about seven minutes too long, as some
of Lopez’s solos are a tad sloppy and drawn out. The album
closes with a crushing return to the chorus followed by the same
melody that the album began with, but this time Zavala sings with
more urgency, the emotion and bombast of the experience having
truly worn him out. “Frances the Mute” is a challenging
and difficult album. Like Radiohead’s “Kid A” and
Bjork’s “Medulla,” it will divide audiences.
While not perfect, in “Frances the Mute” The Mars Volta
has crafted an unprecedented spectacle memorable as much for its
quality and complexity as for its unquestioned ambition. -Mark
Humphrey