Today I sat through all 76 minutes of The Mars Volta's latest release "Frances the Mute" for my much-hyped 'critical listen.' This critical listen inevitably involves trading in my soul for my anus, eschewing emotion for total and careful scrutiny. I always figured that albums with the ability to stir emotions in me even at my most demanding would have to go down as winners in the best-selling Jeremiah Methven Book of Albums That Are Winners. "Frances the Mute," however, goes in the lesser-known book, the book of albums that contains now just three albums. These three albums are Use Your Illusion One, Use Your Illusion Two, and now Frances the Mute. These are the albums I find to be permanently scarred by their excesses, shaken from having reached the fatal nexus where pretension exceeds the limits of good taste. Hopefully my writing isn't on a collision course for that nexus, but judging by my excessive vocabulary, it probably is!
Anyways, as I have often proclaimed among friends and colleagues, a personally-crafted 40-minute edited version of the 150-minute Use Your Illusion behemoth would be a truly masterful album, one that would get a BIG GOLDEN STAR in the Book of Winners.
Frances the Mute does not quite smack of that unrealized potential in the same way that Use Your Illusion does, because verily, all the great music is already there. Re-making Use Your Illusion would require changes in production, cutting out numerous tracks, tasks more elaborate than what would be required to edit Frances the Mute.
All Frances the Mute needed to be a great album was someone to smuggle a time travel machine into the recording studio, take the Volta back to 1970, and force them to be restricted by the 40 to 45 minute LP running time. Sure, they could have been assholes, and just made a double LP, but I believe that bands were less willing to do that back in the day because a double LP was bound to be scoured by critics and rejected by the public in a way that an 80-minute CD is not. After all, a double album costs double, but an 80-minute CD costs the same as a 40-minute CD!
The Volta crafted five great songs for Frances the Mute with tons of great instrumental passages, bass lines so fast as to give the casual bassist permanent mindfuck, complex and hard to get into, but ultimately enthralling melodies, and of course, the heavy metal god (dess?) vocals of Cedric Bixler-Zavala to top off the pristine seven-layer cake.
Unfortunately half the CD seems to exist only to try and challenge such luminaries as Michael Jackson and Bono as the most pretentious artist (s) on the planet. I think Zuke said something along the lines of "It was alright until the cricket noises" in a heated conversation about the worth of the Mars Volta. Zuke, they're actually the coqui frogs of Puerto Rico, but I suppose you had the right idea either way. I'm not sure who the Volta was trying to impress by dropping their vast gallery of frog noises right in the middle of the album. I suppose the frog noises stand out as the worst example of the pretension on this record, but there is also a lot of pointless jamming.
I even think the Volta could get away with jamming, considering their technical superiority, except that their "jams" often consist of taking away the awesome rhythm section, maybe playing some jagged guitar, but more likely playing random notes on quiet synthesizers and keyboards. I could listen to them rock out forever, yet the longest instrumental passages here are quiet, and without the visceral carnage that they normally churn up, the Volta quickly turn into an aggravatingly mundane avant-garde band.
Hell, I even almost like the lyrics to this album. They still read like Mad Libs played only with SAT vocab words, but as allmusic.com pointed out, there is a strange beauty about them in places.
[insert your own conclusion here; it would just be a pointless re-hash of what I've already said, and besides, I need to go pick up Kirill for some bball!]
