The Mars Volta - Frances the Mute [Green 3LP]

New Vinyl - Reissue
Glow-In-The-Dark Green

4250795604914

1.Cygnus....Vismund Cygnus

• Sarcophagi
• Umbilical Syllables
• Facilis Descensus Averni
• Con Safo

2. The Widow

3. L'Via L'Viaquez 

4. Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore

• Vade Mecum
• Pour Another Icepick
• Pisacis (Phra-Men-Ma)
• Con Safo

5. Cassandra Gemini

• Tarantism
• Plant a Nail in the Navel Stream
• Faminepulse
• Multiple Spouse Wounds
• Sarcophagi

If one needed further proof of the contemporary revival/reassessment of the ambitiously overwrought sensibilities once so reviled in '70s rock, this aggressively mindbending second album by the Mars Volta offers it up in spades. Band mainstays Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala insist that labels like "prog" don't interest them, and that this is emphatically not a "sequel" to 2003's De-Loused in the Comatorium. What it is was thematically inspired by a stranger's diary allegedly found by late bandmate Jeremy Ward, the basis for an expansive, often amorphous musical head-trip that brews psychedelia, trance, hard-rock and free-jazz into a daunting new whole. The dozen tracks here represent but five "songs" proper, though the band's disdain for conventional track banding inspire it to sound more like a stream-of-consciousness soundscape from Can—or a dark, lyrically inventive, if decidedly troubled corner of their ids. On the "Umbilical Syllables" portion of "Cygnus.." and "The Widow" Bixler-Zavala invokes the wailing, Led Zeppelin II & III spirit of Robert Plant set against a feverish, swirling melange that's anything but the blues. The vocalist coaxes "L' Via l'Viaquez" en Espanol, while his band indulges its space-mambo conceits with an evocative spirit that recalls Latin Playboys at their most mischievous. It's an album that loops back on itself in a haunting ellipse—and one whose boundless ambition makes Pink Floyd sound like three-chord bar punters by comparison.