Can you really have too much of a good thing? The Mars Volta’s debut De-loused In The Comatorium was such a blood red feast, this listener’s digestive juices were still busy breaking the thing down when word came of a follow up. And whaddya know – the scope, scale, complexity and ambition of Frances The Mute, recorded in NY, LA, Puerto Rico and Australia, make its predecessor seem almost straightforward.
For starters, the opening ‘Cygnus… Vismund Cygnus’ is a furnace of late Zeppelin dynamics crossed with Latin rhythm, unbelievable playing and ferocious kinetic energy. Cedric Bixler Zavala spits castrato non-sequiturs over Omar A Rodriguez-Lopez’s serpentine licks, with a '70s soul string arrangement thrown in for good measure. The single (ha!)‘The Widow’, is probably the closest thing to an orthodox rock tune on here, but even that’s so convoluted with mariachi metal shapes one suspects the musicians (the extended cast includes Lenny Castro on percussion as well as Flea on trumpet and John Frusciante on guitar) required a map just to play the thing through once, never mind arrange and mix it.
Elsewhere, ‘L’ Via L’ Viaquez’ slips from hard rock to slinky samba then back to cracked blaxploitation and dissonant skronk, concluding with an electric flamenco flourish. It’s as if Sketches Of Spain had been revived by one of Miles’s later fusion bands with one eye on stadium rock and the other on Trout Mask Replica. As for the closing 24-minute ‘Cassandra Geminni’, with its Coletrane ascensions, it would take about a month to properly digest and describe its labyrinthine cells and chambers.
So there’s no middle ground. If you buy into this, you’re just gonna have to indulge The Mars Volta their sprawling ambitions. Yes, entire passages of ambient atmospheres and exercises in electronic sound manipulation could’ve been edited from the mix without incurring much damage, but those Roger Dean slurs miss the point. The Storm Thorgerson artwork, the titles, the way the tracks are broken up into movements, plus the overarching theme (Frances… is based on a notebook found by deceased MV FX man Jeremy Ward, detailing the anonymous diarist’s search for his birth parents) – these are merely cosmetic. The Mars Volta are as plugged into the dark heart of gothic Mexican duende and bordertown punk as they are King Crimson and Physical Graffiti. Cedric’s lyrics are not meditations on hobgoblins and fairies so much as apparitional bad trips through vistas of tombstone teeth, snake eyes, black lungs, crawling bugs and crucifixes.
As I write, the HP message board is buzzing with debate over this album, with even faithful followers struggling to get their chops around its ungainly bulk. Understandably enough, some folk still hanker after At The Drive-In’s furious tautologies. I know I do. But give it time. This is a long day’s journey across topographies populated with grinning skeletons bedecked in feathers and top hats. Frances The Mute bristles with hallucinatory imaginative powers, and, in parts, a sort of genius.
Later for that three-minute garage rock record.