Prog's Best Executed Narrative?

 

Quadrophenia is one I think work really wells. (I'm speaking only of the album here, not the movie, which doesn't follow the album exactly anyway.) Something about the music and sequencing and lyrics really brings to life and makes very real, almost painfully so, the mental state and evolution of the main character. Even though the mod references date things a little, it's still very vivid to someone like me who was born in 1981. Even though ending is unsatisfying on paper-he's on a rock in the rain in the sea with no specific result in sight- it seems to work brilliantly as a symbolic non-resolution of the powerful and conflicting emotions you go through as an adolescent. Or something, what a lot of literature grad rubbish that was,

 

Frances The Mute is an interesting one. The specific storyline is a closely guarded secret, supposedly because it's literally about Jeremy Ward himself, and not a diary he found in a car as the band said. The reason for this smokescreen is that The Mars Volta had been dismayed by fans poring over every aspect of Julio Venagas' (subject of previous album Deloused In The Comatorium) life, writing sh*t about him on the internet, bothering his family, chatting about intimate private details and relationships and so on. So when they decided to tribute Ward, they felt they should obscure things a bit in order to protect his memory/family. However, the band has said that the story is non-fiction.

FTM's narrative shouldn't work. In the practical sense there isn't one. The music doesn't make it clear where the characters are and what's going on and Zavala's lyrics are deeply unhelpful. And yet *somehow* in a way I can't articulate, there is a clear vibe of a deeply unpleasant story unfolding. The consensus is that the story is about an adopted child who decides to sort out his life by coming off heroin and finding his birth parents. However, he discovers that his father murdered his mother and the shock sends him back to heroin and he fatally ODs. One notes that Ward was adopted and died from a heroin relapse. Whatever, there's a sense of a compelling grisly mystery that makes you listen to the album again and again hoping to find further clues even though you never will.

 

Also worth mentioning is The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. Once again, it looks like absolute madness on paper, positively fruity. Yet, largely due to the well delivered vocal performances, there are moments like The Lamia and The Carpet Crawlers where the ludicrousness of some of the situations is forgotten and it's like you're reading Alice In Wonderland.

 

Also, Scenes From A Memory. Perhaps a bit overwrought and I'm not sure they judged things right- the clarity is inconsistent with some parts of the story being explained outright and others fudged over- but it certainly intrigues and has a haunting conclusion.