Review Summary: There are albums, and then there are albums...
Frances the Mute, the Mars Volta's sophomore album, begins with ambiance (that is, considering the unreleased title track as the official beginning to the album). A fitting start, as anyone who has listened to it in full would be sure to tell you. And from the ambiance, suddenly, a guitar forms, then drums, and then Cedric Bixler-Zavala's unearthly vocals assault the ears. The lyrics are, as is expected, jumbled, abstract and seemingly meaningless. Every line only making the well of speculation that is the album's narrative deeper. It is here that you, the listener, begin your journey. And, like any true journey, it will take you far from home, and many things will become clear, should you choose to listen.
TMV's debut is, indeed, fantastic. De-Loused in the Comatorium is a tightly constructed yet beautifully chaotic mess of an album, but there is something it lacked to be truly perfect. De-Loused is burdened by its humanity, which is normal, in fact, it's one of the best things any human band would ever hope to make. Frances, on the other hand, sounds like a record that manifested into existence, like something discovered in deep space inside a capsule labeled “Do Not Open”.
Some (in my experience, most) might accuse the record of being wildly inconsistent and schizophrenic at its best and aggressive navel-gazing at its worst, and they miss the point. Frances is not to be split into pieces and dissected. In that sense, it resembles a rollercoaster more than any traditional collection of songs. Yes, it's true that a composition consisting of five minutes of crickets chirping might be laughed out of most concert halls, but that doesn't make it devoid of value. Whereas anyone could listen to Televators or Inertiatic ESP by themselves, there is no track here one should be comfortable listening to by itself, precisely because they are not meant to.
It is in that sense that one might describe the album as a manifestation of all things extraterrestrial, a sort of museum exposition of pictures painted by aliens of what they think earthly life to be like. Suddenly, familiar topics and emotions become strange and aloof and the listener is forced to take a new perspective on things. And the show is structured in such a way that it all seems fragmented, yet somehow connected. The operatic choruses of Cygnus... Vismund Cygnus clash beautifully with its verses and intro, yet to separate each of the parts would be to lose the point and elegance of a beautifully assembled product.
On Track 2 (or 3, considering the lost opener), things almost become normal enough for you to take a step back and understand the bigger picture, but again there is this otherworldly feeling that something is not quite as it seems, and the talk of slithering scales only serves to unsettle you further. It is here that you start getting the sense of a bigger concept, for this is, in fact, a concept album. The concept, however, would be missed by a single concrete explanation, as this story is as oblique and mysterious as the album in which it is presented.
Experimentation is a constant focus, and it yields results that range from the unsettling (as evidenced by the final, distorted chorus of “L'Via L'Viaquez”) to the unexpected, to the purely bizarre, and yet it all somehow works, again, much like a rollercoaster which twists and turns and yet manages to end where it all began.
And that is another aspect of the piece. It is highly cyclical, whether it be the ever-present melody of sarcophagi, the enigmatic mentions of the number 25 or the multiple choruses and nonsense sentences repeated throughout each of the massive songs, Frances manages to play itself out so naturally you can only speculate how and why it was created.
By the time Jazz is incorporated into the mix around the end of the highly ethereal “Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore”, it becomes clear that stopping is not an option. Every movement has, after all, been calculated within the nanometer. Every climax and respite, every high and every low mapped out and planned. And just as you begin to settle and breathe easy knowing that the danger was never real to begin with, the monster that is Frances The Mute delivers to you its greatest, sneakiest left hook in the form of the colossal “Cassandra Gemini”. Sitting at a comfortable 32 and a half minutes, the closing track pulls no punches (ironically) in fully showcasing a descent into madness. Its start almost startles and it all goes downhill from there, as Cedric's voice bends, breaks and the instruments explode into a cacophony of mad, mad beauty.
The album ends, narratively, in a manner that is perfectly complemented by the music. The claims from the narrator that life was just a lie and that there is no light all seem to contribute towards comparing the tragic fall of the protagonist to an apocalypse of sorts. You speculate as these sentiments are matched with sudden orchestral flair and crescent riffs that devolve into yet more ambiance, more disjointed sounds and, finally, bare acoustics, as if the metaphorical museum exposition concluded by being carpet-bombed so that all which remains is no more than a collection of atoms, disordered and chaotic, but no less beautiful or massive.
And as a final rendition of sarcophagi comes to a close, you wonder how the lyrics can say nothing but mean everything at the same time, and all that is left is silence, you realize you have returned home. It is now dark outside, you open a window to let some air in and stare at the sky, with only a handful of stars to be seen, you can hear crickets chirping, the sound somehow comforts you.
