Artist: The Mars Volta
Title: Frances The Mute
Label: GSL-Universal
Format: CD
Price: $8.08 15% off until March 11th

I don’t get enough of the rock. Sometimes it’s necessary to go back to old Thin Lizzy albums for the rock. I won’t need Thin Lizzy for at least a few weeks. The Mars Volta has given us old guys “Frances the Mute.” Winners of the current Create Song Titles for An Imaginary Yes Album contest, The Mars Volta lead off with the four-part song “Cygnus….Vismund Cygnus.” Frankly, I haven’t heard the album enough to tell you what the four parts in “Cygnus” mean, or how they are similar to or differentiate from one another but I can tell you that the song begins with some too-quiet, pretty acoustic guitar before unleashing a shit-storm of the rock. I almost cranked up the volume knob but I KNEW the rock was coming. “Frances the Mute” re-visits many of the devices that made The Mars Volta’s debut, “De-Loused in the Comatorium,” so appealing; odd-time signatures, near-falsetto vocal acrobatics, dramatic shifts in dynamics within and between songs, overt Prog tendencies, and an unidentifiable melodic pop element that grabs me when the noise moves past 11. Pitchfork turned some phun phrases in their 2.0 review – “In this sense, they're more Mastodon than King Crimson-- only they kick about a third as much ass as a Dream Theater side project” & “Smoke a bowl first if you need to, but nothing short of opium will convince me that there aren't more productive ways to spend 30 minutes trying to fell a redwood with a plastic spoon than listening to this beast” in referring to the closing track “Cassandra Gemini” – that made me want to hear the album all the more. Now that I have, I’m clearing space on my Top 10 of 2005 list. Get it cheap cheap cheap this week.