Mars Volta - Frances The Mute

The newest issue of Entertainment Weekly was waiting for me in my mailbox yesterday, and as I perused its pages, I found a section about “prog” rock and how bands like System Of A Down and The Mars Volta were making music weird again. I couldn’t agree more. Weird is the perfect word for this album. The article went on to say that Frances The Mute was “surprisingly listenable,” and with that, I couldn’t disagree more. Being a fan of At The Drive-In, and of anything original, I really want to like this band. Really, I do! But they just make it so damn hard. Even the track listing on this disc is different. Consisting of twelve tracks, the first is divided into four sections (a,b,c,d), and tracks four through twelve form two larger sections, one consisting of five parts, the other of four. The titles of these songs will seriously have you scratching your head. For example “Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore: B. Pour Another Icepick,” is the label applied to track number five, and what it means, I have no earthly idea. Weird track names are just fine; hell, I am even a fan of long and unique album and track names, but the real oddness comes when you hit play. De-Loused In The Comatorium, the bands debut, was a quirky and random mix of several different styles and prospectives, but it held together reasonably well enough to sit through, and each track had a melody or discernable mission. This time around, all that is lost and the spaciousness and aimlessness fully take over, to the point where the disc is almost hard to get through. The first four tracks take nearly 45 minutes to get through, and almost ten minutes of that is noise. Tracks end and begin with long two minute areas of guitar noise and atmospheric sounds that destroy any momentum or cohesiveness the disc had going. When the band actually plays music, it is pretty dang good, but just when you start to feel there is something you can grasp onto, the disc jumps to another moment of oddity, and you are left wondering what the hell is going on. In the end the disc just feels weird for the sake of being weird and falls flat on its red velvet covered face. I am all for moving art forward, but this disc really just left me wishing the guys would skip the crap and just sit down and play songs - no fluff, no noise, no weirdness in the way. [www.themarsvolta.com]