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.

Read the full thing here.

Knowledge gaps, and those things which rule therein

Here are thirteen things Science, as it is, cannot explain.
These things should not exist. But they do.

Scientists believe these are the frontiers of knowledge, to be braved and understood. Critics of secularism believe these are the latest in a growing list of reasons science is fundamentally wrong. Why science can never explain things as well as the Bible does.

Scientists and creationists alike often assert that we, knowing about such things, and such opinions, have a decision to make. It's science vs. the Bible, winner take all. I don't think it's like that at all.

[Thus begins the childhood reflection that had a point initially, but whose structure folded under its own girth and can now be read primarily as a cautionary tale against excess sentiment. Skipping to the conclusion is advised.]

As a child [and, as I think about it, also as a adolescent, teenager, young adult], science was considered by certain family members to be, at worst, the subversions of Lucifer, and, at best, the dangerous and capricious acts of mortal hands.

To watch Nature or Nova or National Geographic with my dad was to court a lecture:

TV: . . . the ground sloth became extinct 10,000 yea--
Dad: Ha! That's about 4 thousand years and seven days too early pal.

Wild America with Marty Stouffer was generally free of evolution talk and hence a demilitarized zone.

The evenings I drew up the courage to ask questions went something like this:

Me: But, dad, what about the dinosaurs?
Dad: What about them son?
Me: Well, didn't they have to live before us? How could we fight a T. Rex? [After I read Jurassic Park 'T. Rex' became 'Velociraptor' and the argument gained power]
Dad: No son, they lived right here with us.
Me: But [and there would be any number of questions to this, the most enlightening of which was] the bible doesn't mention dinosaurs. Does it?
Dad: Sure it does.
Me: Which ones?
Dad: . . . Triceratops.
Me: Where?

I'm still waiting on the answer to that one. The behemoths of Job chapter 40 not bearing any descriptive resemblance to a Triceratops.

My father has a naturally suspicious nature, dubious of the unknown, the novel. He moved here from California because he didn't like being around so many people. Before meeting my mother in Spokane, and striking the bargain of settling down in a town called Elk, Washington, he lived in the more isolated Rathdrum, Idaho. There being no jobs in Rathdrum, he still had to commute to Spokane daily.

Spokane being just larger than the town in California he'd sought to escape.

Here atop our foothill, quarters of miles from our closest neighbor, some twenty miles from any population center, up an imposing private drive with signs warning against entry without prior approval, father is constantly on the lookout for people looking to take his things. People like an easy score, father says. Easy being a half-mile drive up a rutted road to a house that might not even exist, but in which, upon discovery, one would find two large dogs, heavily dead-bolted door, guns everywhere and, you know, almost nothing of value.

My father is not a stupid person. There are times when his intelligence frightens me. My mother isn't dumb either, nor is her youngest brother, her sister, father. Nor are my dad's brothers, sisters.

They're believers.

They watch the news, see death upon death, murder upon murder and believe people are trying to kill them. They listen to talk radio and believe that taxes should be lowered, and that our borders must be closed, our language preserved from swarthy encroach [my father being, himself, half Mexican]. They believe there is a vast conspiracy against America's collective values, homogeneous as they are. The conspiracy involves faggots and college professors. They see thousands of angry Arabs with guns shouting down America on television and believe, as is suggested, that Islam, as a whole, is out to get us. Us being we, specifically, up our driveway, invisible from the main road. We with our dogs and guns and lack of strategic importance. Terrorism can happen anywhere.

Also, primarily, they listen to their pastors, read the bible's delicate and varied poetry--written by so many hands, re-written by so many more--and they believe.

They believe not only that God is who he says he is, and that God sent Jesus, the word made flesh--part of but also separate from God himself--they believe each word of the bible is utter and immutable, unchanged yesterday, today and tomorrow. Most critically, they believe that this homogenous truth is to be understood literally. They believe, also, as every generation of Christian has before them, that the end times are near. They point to wars and rumors of wars as signal that God's return is nigh.

Against that kind of truth, that juggernaut of prophesy and tradition, and in such dangerous times, the come-lately guess and check uncertainty of science holds little weight. Some people, understandably, are uncomfortable with the ideas that today's truths might be proven wrong in the future.

Yet it is exactly that intellectual nimbleness that scientists (and science fanboys) believe is their great strength. Anything as turgid and inflexible as dogma, religious and otherwise, cannot hope to adjust to change at any speed, let alone at the breathless pace of [technological, population, ethical] expansion in the contemporary world.

Until college this dialogue, this difference of viewpoint, was totally unknown to me. Christians were right, scientists were morons. My World History teacher told us to skip the first three chapters, prehistory to Egypt loosely, because they were anthropological speculation, not history. My biology teacher [runner-up to Bill Nye for that coveted PBS gig] taught evolution but prefaced it the way certain Georgia school districts tried to. It's a well-accepted theory, but still a theory, as such . . . In hindsight it was a brilliant survival strategy within our school district, but the effect on me personally was to view evolution as in direct conflict with the Bible's teaching, varied as it was.

[The conclusion, more or less, begins here]

The perceived insolubility between science and [ostensibly, my] religion didn't end until I met some very intelligent and very religious people in college. They suggested that the faith of my parents and the science of most everyone else wasn't in conflict.

The Bible, really, has nothing to say about science and science, insofar as it concerns itself with only the experiential, only those concrete things we can touch and see everyday, has nothing to say about the religious experience.

Whatever tension exists, then, stems from an arrogance on both sides. On one hand, it is a reach to suggest that a book written between 3000+ and 1500 years ago can still tell us things about how our world works [most people agree, after all, that Aristotle's physics suck, and I trust him more than whoever wrote Joshua]. Similarly, it's an indefensible leap of logic to assert that not being able to observe something [i.e. God] is not sufficient to exclude it entirely. Such people overreach their explanatory realm.

It is equally dishonest, intellectually, to say, "this book says X, and this book is true, so X is true," as it is to say, "We have not observed Y, therefore Y cannot exist." Both these assertions can be defended the same way.

To "this book is true" and "Y cannot exist" just say:

"Prove it."

Of course that's never good enough for hardline anti-scientists and staunch atheist/secularists, but really, no one could hope to reform either group anyway.

The experiential world is not a thing to be taken on faith. It can be observed, and understood. This process is continual, and ongoing. Everything that is known was once unknown. Those things we can know will, one day, be known. Those things that remain, then, being not of this world--unknowable--are matters of faith and carry no less power.

So let us rejoice

and concern ourselves accordingly.

Read the full thing here.