Frances the [long-winded] mute

Email correspondence as record review

The Mars Volta's first album was great. If you would have talked to me a couple years ago, I would have used big, laudatory words and pointed out single drumbeats and anguished wails, to describe it. Clearly evidence of some unearthly genius.

I eventually got over it and formed a more modest opinion of it as a triumph of ambition and experimentation.

their second album, Frances the Mute, is not. Somehow, TMV's logical progression was toward thematic dissonance and self-absorption, I couldn't even bring myself to review it--mostly because a review would have forced me to confront just what I hated about it. My hatred, at the time, was diffuse and directionless.

Then, last night, something magic happened. I was trolling a few blogs and came across this:

Is it just me...

...or is The Mars Volta the new Radiohead?

It was late. I was cranky from writer's block, so I decided to write an email. It looked like this:

"...or is The Mars Volta the new Radiohead?"

For that to be true, TMV would have to make meandering but thematically uniform music with cohesive lyrics and a commitment to craft over ego.
Frances the Mute shows the exact opposite. It's an excuse to play around with bleep machines and indulge teenage lust for gnarly guitar solos set against salsa percussion. Formless prog regurgitate.
Bixler and Rodriguez-Lopez have been preoccupied with flexing lyrical nuts since At the Drive-In, and now that they don't have anyone to ruin their fun, it's all nonsensical poly-syllables and prostitute references.
Further: Radiohead has never written a song title in Latin
TMV=Radiohead might have worked better just after Deloused in the Comatorium. Now they're more like Smashing Pumpkins after the Batman and Robin Soundtrack.

Isamu Jordan graciously replied:

I'm surprised you don't find Frances the Mute to bw "meandering but thematically uniform" (the super-Latin touch being one of many uniform themes throughout the album). You don't get much more meandering than the opening track.

To me, The Mars Volta came up with a relatively unique sound in De-Loused, and then threw all sense of compromise out the window to fully indulge their creativity in Frances, winning over fans while giving the finger to contemporary pop music and any radio potential. In my little bizarro world, De-Loused is the OK Computer that led to the Kid A equivalent, Frances the Mute (if I were to make a comparison to Smashing Pumpkins, it would be Mellon Collie).

Not that TMV and Radiohead sound remotely alike, but the principles and impact seem to be following the same pattern.

Wasn't Kid A just an excuse to play with new toys?

And I'm as reluctant to call Yorke's lyrics cohesive as I am to say Bixler's are not.

Good points, all. To whit I replied:

That's not a bad analogy really, I get where you're coming from. Though I think there is a crucial difference. You're probably right that both bands have had a stepping off point [Kid A and Frances], distancing themselves from the mainstream, but I think they stepped in opposite directions. Or perhaps, took opposite approaches.

This is my personal thing, but I hate solos [guitar, drum, otherwise] in pop music more than anything. Hate Santana. Barely survived the 80's. They're tangential and destroy a song's rhythm. They represent the worst of rock star hubris.

I also think there is a difference between lyrics that employ veiled imagery and symbolism and lyrics that stab at poesy with mindless polysyllabism.

Compare [from Mars Volta's Miranda, that Ghost . . .]
The nest they made couldn't break you
Along the fallen
Scowled a fence of beaks
But the temple is scathing
Through your veins
They were scaling
Through an ice pick of abscess reckoning

With [from Radiohead's How to Disappear . . .]
I'm not here
This isn't happening
I'm not here, I'm not here

In a little while
I'll be gone
The moment's already passed
Yeah, it's gone

Neither song has a particularly explicit intent, but I think the latter actually means something. "Through an ice pick of abscess reckoning" -- They've been writing lines like that since At the Drive-In, and its formula that pops up pretty often:

Vaguely dangerous implement [icepick] + some sort of wound [abscess] + an accusatory or judgmental noun [reckoning] that sounds good with the first two = An AtDI or TMV lyric

When you have two egomaniacs like Bixler and Lopez constantly trying to one-up each other with ever zanier instrumentation and ever more ostentatious lyrics, you can never hope to have cohesion. The fundamental difference between them and Radiohead, in my opinion, is that while both bands "[gave] the finger to contemporary pop music and any radio potential" I think TMV were simultaneously giving each other the finger as well.

RH, even in its most experimental moments, feels like a band, Frances the Mute sounds like a Santana album featuring Slash that has been given over totally to the forces of ego and entropy.

Frances the Mute has been a fairly polarizing album. Spin gave it a 90. Rollingstone sided with Isamu calling it, "the beastly spawn of Radiohead's OK Computer and Rush's 2112," en route to awarding it four stars. On the other hand, Cokemachineglow gave it a 17 [out of 100] and Pitchfork called it a "homogeneous shitheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity," giving it a 20.

What do you think? Prog fans, Mars Volta fans, Radiohead fans, anyone. Weigh in on this.