Hezo Kittie

In 50 years, when we're all old and wrinkly, your grandbabies will come up to you and ask you where you were when Frances the Mute came out. Some may say it is too early to judge, but what's contained on a piece of plastic with 77 minutes worth of music is all the makings of a classic.

Listening to Mars Volta now is both a breath of fresh air in modern rock music and a tribute to rock's past. Frances doesn't have your average record structure of single-single-album track-filler-single-album track, yet their abilities as musicians show that they're capable of writing such an album if they wanted. Spikes of killer hooks and pretty double tracked vocals seem to pop up in what initially seems like guitar-synth canoodling, and paired with their meticulous songwriting, they'd be able to create what could've been chart topping singles and mainstays on alternative radio. Instead what they give us something quite stronger than the sum of its parts.

De-loused in the Comatorium was a great album, but it was simply the beginning, because Frances takes the more complex and, well, longer songs from that album and expands on them on their new full-length. One of the great sections from De-loused was on Cicatriz ESP, when the screaming chorus of "I've defected" dissolves into the doom and gloom of what sounds like an underground sewer, leaving the listener breathless in anticipation, only to be reincarnated with the barrage of a twisted three-guitar attack that leads to a more powerful and frighteningly intense reprise of the aforementioned chorus.

Like this song, this album has a fine number of powerful riffs and vocal hooks included, but is structured into a free-flowing exploration that will take the listener's full undivided attention to fully appreciate. Instead of thinking they wasted a few minutes in between specific sections of a song, take a different approach and let the music be your guide, instead of dictating how you want them to play the music to you. Let your goosebumps rise when the trumpets appear in Miranda This Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore and the verse gradually forms around you. Feel your hair blow back when some of the loudest riffs this side of Refused threaten to split your eardrums. What was once a good album becomes a sensory overload, a vessel of what is a very unique experience.

Musical revisionists will probably look back on the general praise this album received and criticize its vague and oddball lyrics, but I personally think the lyrics (which are supposedly from a diary ex-bandmember Jeremy Ward found and completed himself) are appropriate for the music at hand. They only add to what is essentially a timeless piece of music, one that doesn't reside in a particular era or genre, taking the breakneck speeds of the most basic punk rock, the huge riffs of 70s metal, and the prog structures of yesteryear and adding a touch of their own Hispanic roots. The passion for rock music and their deceased friend Ward is apparent in every breath Cedric Bixler-Zavala takes on the record, and that's enough to cement the Mars Volta as the saviors of a music seemingly lost, but now one that feels vital and alive.