Review
In 1998, just as At the Drive-In singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez were quitting their day jobs in El Paso, Texas, the Yes song “Heart of the Sunrise” showed up in a trailer for Vincent Gallo’s film Buffalo 66. And oddly, all its early-’70s excesses sounded legit: the long-division time signatures, the octopus drum parts, all the grandiose hallmarks of progressive rock. It reminded you that speed, technique, precision and composition can still bite the nervous system, can give you the shove and shock that says listen to me now.
Punk tried to wipe away all that: After the Ramones, the rock underground shunned the clinician, the fiddly-widdly music student; he became a pariah figure, derisively nicknamed “muso.” But speed and structure have been part of Western music for a lot longer than ripped T-shirts. The punk reaction against rock suites was a general reaction against hippies. And prog rockers — obsessive, detail-oriented — were hippie misfits. In the past few years, prog has streamed back into rock, from the metal of Dillinger Escape Plan and System of a Down to Radiohead’s electronic symphonies to the dozens of varied jam bands that fill the fields of Bonnaroo every summer.
Mars Volta say they don’t want you to think about Yes, or prog rock, when you hear Frances the Mute. But moments of Rush and Yes and ELO are all up in this second album’s strident, pompous drama, and in Bixler-Zavala’s high, vibrato-filled voice. (It is not at all in Rodriguez-Lopez’s guitar playing, which breaks into ringing, atonal lines.) The band, overall, is into speed and exactitude and impact, and this is a visceral, powerful muso’s record, a nerve-jangling explosion in a drum clinic.
Ably produced by Rodriguez-Lopez, if without the sensurround feeling of Rick Rubin’s production on the band’s debut, De-Loused in the Comatorium, it’s an album rendered as a suite: three long, multipart pieces and two shorter stand-alones, each about five minutes long. An album whose English and Spanish lyrics (about the search for biological parents) were inspired by a diary found in the back of a car by a now-deceased band member who worked as a repo man.
Which is not the kind of subject matter that would’ve interested Yes. Mars Volta’s songwriters took what they liked from a virtuosic tradition, discarded the silly piping-in-a-glen and mountains-come-out-of-the-sky, roughed it up through a mordant sensibility and added ambient scraping, static and salsa piano solos. Frances the Mute is heaping proof of their ambition, a heavily detailed, high-impact serving of something genuinely new.
There are a small number of yowled references supporting the stated theme — “Separating the mother from child,” “Mothers and feathers start to drown the living proof,” “Una historia sin mi madre.” But the lyrics, like those on De-Loused, are largely incoherent clinical-science gloom-poems with surreal nightmare imagery; they seem more in tune with the film and videos of Nine Inch Nails collaborator David Fincher.
At the Drive-In seemed, from the outward signs (flags draped over amps, MC5 hairdos), to have revolutionary political content. But there was no trackable message there, just spasmodic garage-punk gestures and gold-plated certainty. Certainty, still, is what you’re whistling when you finish listening to Mars Volta. There’s a confidence, not just in the sound of their own group — which has swelled to six members, including two guitars, percussion and keyboards — but also in the way they gild their own lily, with extra musicians playing bits of strings, and some unfortunately inept trumpet improvisation. In one portion of “L’Via L’Viaquez,” the album’s standout track, there’s even a slow Latin vamp and an excellent, collapsing, somersaulting solo played by ’70s-era salsa pianist Larry Harlow. On top of it all is the oddity of Bixler-Zavala’s voice, as full-throated as Bono’s, as maudlin as Robert Smith’s of the Cure, as high as Jon Anderson’s of Yes.
These sons of the ’70s remain unafraid of pretension. Long, drippy ambient sequences segment the record. There is an entire minute of bird chirping at the beginning of the suite called “Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore,” followed by nearly three minutes of mystery noise and Cedric-wail, the sub-part of the suite-within-the-suite entitled “Vade Mecum.” And for the two minutes that end “The Widow” — which itself is just (just!) a six-minute song — there are only wheezing synth tones and a bubbly cumulus you could make at home with a digital-delay pedal.
Despite mountains of lyrics, this is not a word band. It’s a sound band — the sound of almost randomly foregrounded phrases like “Exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed,” from the last album, or “Who do you trust?” from this one. It’s a whoosh band, a vroom band, a rush band. And maybe, a little bit, a Rush band.
DOWNLOAD: “The Widow,” “L’Via L’Viaquez”
Punk tried to wipe away all that: After the Ramones, the rock underground shunned the clinician, the fiddly-widdly music student; he became a pariah figure, derisively nicknamed “muso.” But speed and structure have been part of Western music for a lot longer than ripped T-shirts. The punk reaction against rock suites was a general reaction against hippies. And prog rockers — obsessive, detail-oriented — were hippie misfits. In the past few years, prog has streamed back into rock, from the metal of Dillinger Escape Plan and System of a Down to Radiohead’s electronic symphonies to the dozens of varied jam bands that fill the fields of Bonnaroo every summer.
Mars Volta say they don’t want you to think about Yes, or prog rock, when you hear Frances the Mute. But moments of Rush and Yes and ELO are all up in this second album’s strident, pompous drama, and in Bixler-Zavala’s high, vibrato-filled voice. (It is not at all in Rodriguez-Lopez’s guitar playing, which breaks into ringing, atonal lines.) The band, overall, is into speed and exactitude and impact, and this is a visceral, powerful muso’s record, a nerve-jangling explosion in a drum clinic.
Ably produced by Rodriguez-Lopez, if without the sensurround feeling of Rick Rubin’s production on the band’s debut, De-Loused in the Comatorium, it’s an album rendered as a suite: three long, multipart pieces and two shorter stand-alones, each about five minutes long. An album whose English and Spanish lyrics (about the search for biological parents) were inspired by a diary found in the back of a car by a now-deceased band member who worked as a repo man.
Which is not the kind of subject matter that would’ve interested Yes. Mars Volta’s songwriters took what they liked from a virtuosic tradition, discarded the silly piping-in-a-glen and mountains-come-out-of-the-sky, roughed it up through a mordant sensibility and added ambient scraping, static and salsa piano solos. Frances the Mute is heaping proof of their ambition, a heavily detailed, high-impact serving of something genuinely new.
There are a small number of yowled references supporting the stated theme — “Separating the mother from child,” “Mothers and feathers start to drown the living proof,” “Una historia sin mi madre.” But the lyrics, like those on De-Loused, are largely incoherent clinical-science gloom-poems with surreal nightmare imagery; they seem more in tune with the film and videos of Nine Inch Nails collaborator David Fincher.
At the Drive-In seemed, from the outward signs (flags draped over amps, MC5 hairdos), to have revolutionary political content. But there was no trackable message there, just spasmodic garage-punk gestures and gold-plated certainty. Certainty, still, is what you’re whistling when you finish listening to Mars Volta. There’s a confidence, not just in the sound of their own group — which has swelled to six members, including two guitars, percussion and keyboards — but also in the way they gild their own lily, with extra musicians playing bits of strings, and some unfortunately inept trumpet improvisation. In one portion of “L’Via L’Viaquez,” the album’s standout track, there’s even a slow Latin vamp and an excellent, collapsing, somersaulting solo played by ’70s-era salsa pianist Larry Harlow. On top of it all is the oddity of Bixler-Zavala’s voice, as full-throated as Bono’s, as maudlin as Robert Smith’s of the Cure, as high as Jon Anderson’s of Yes.
These sons of the ’70s remain unafraid of pretension. Long, drippy ambient sequences segment the record. There is an entire minute of bird chirping at the beginning of the suite called “Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore,” followed by nearly three minutes of mystery noise and Cedric-wail, the sub-part of the suite-within-the-suite entitled “Vade Mecum.” And for the two minutes that end “The Widow” — which itself is just (just!) a six-minute song — there are only wheezing synth tones and a bubbly cumulus you could make at home with a digital-delay pedal.
Despite mountains of lyrics, this is not a word band. It’s a sound band — the sound of almost randomly foregrounded phrases like “Exoskeletal junction at the railroad delayed,” from the last album, or “Who do you trust?” from this one. It’s a whoosh band, a vroom band, a rush band. And maybe, a little bit, a Rush band.
DOWNLOAD: “The Widow,” “L’Via L’Viaquez”
