The Mars Volta: Frances The Mute : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In a big-riff age when punk is pop, in the worst fizzy-drink sense, and most heavy metal is as wild as a night at home playing Grand Theft Auto, the Mars Volta's second album is an exhilarating transgression: concussive, nonlinear rhythms; mad-dog guitar algebra; bloody-nightmare suites sung in bilingual free verse. In short, the beastly spawn of Radiohead's OK Computer and Rush's 2112. The only word singer-lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist-producer Omar Rodriguez-Lopez don't care to understand, in any tongue, is compromise. The furious horror of Frances the Mute (a pun on Fifties-screwball-comedy film star Francis the Talking Mule) is only part fiction. Bixler-Zavala's images of flayed skin and maggot rain were inspired by a diary found in a car by band member Jeremy Ward: an orphan's story of the search for his biological parents. It is easy to hear the band's own anguish, too (Ward died in 2003, of a drug overdose), in Rodriguez-Lopez's homicidal guitar seizures and Bixler-Zavala's high, wrenched tenor -- the closest thing in post-rock to Robert Plant's banzai-blues wail in Led Zeppelin. The album's excessive earphone theater and contrary mood jolts (like the Cuban-jazz languor in "L'Via L'Viaquez") may make you impatient. But in both the terse fire of "The Widow" (5:50) and the thrilling eternity of "Cassandra Gemini" (32:32), the Mars Volta show off an intensity of focus -- on hooks that kill and the cleansing powers of thundering whiplash -- that will drive your devils from the room as you're pinned to the wall.