AMPUTECHTURE

As we come to The Mars Volta's third album, the band is moving from being the new blood in progressive rock and into being the established leading lights of modern prog. Where Frances the Mute took the themes of De-Loused and vastly upped the amount of electronic trickery and experimentation, Amputechture goes the other way. Much of the electronic soundscapes are gone, replaced by instrumental soundscapes supplemented with complimentary samples and noise. The result is the kind of album I really was hopping the band to make, one that focuses their style onto their musicianship creating a powerful blast of heavy rock, but not without its subtleties. However, though this album is a big improvement over Frances the Mute, it still isn't perfect. In the two previous albums you could hear that the band were playing close to the edge of chaos, that if they strayed slightly they would have fallen into a complete atonal mess. On Amputechture the band has clearly taken a slight step back from that edge and played ever so slightly safer than before, most notably in the rhythm section, though the occasional breakout still happens. Secondly, the longer songs don't seem to flow anywhere near as well as previous epics from the band did, shifts in the music are bit clunkier. All in all, the result is a fine album that doesn't quite reach the heights that the band scaled on their debut.