FRANCES THE MUTE

I actually quite dig At The Drive In, so when I heard that two of the founding members of that band had a prog rock band and that they had made a concept album, I was quite intrigued! I mean, what could go wrong? Well, curiosity killed the cat here folks. Let's begin with what I actually somewhat liked

"The Widow" is the only song here that isn't downright awful until the secound half of the song. It's still not good, because Cedric throws on this horribly awful "seductive" voice style which is really not my thing.

A very minor and a completly subjective issue, but this album dosen't really have any symphonic/classical elements to it at all which kind of bugged me because prog without that important factor can go horribly wrong. And oh dear... it truly truly did here folks! Well it's time to go into why I consider this to be the worst prog album I've ever listened to.

This band plays without any cohesion or strucutre to their music, except for "L'Via L'Viaquez", which has some order to it, the rest of this album is just a manic and insanely chaotic clusterfuck. "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore" and "Cassandra Geminni" are the worst offenders here. The last track is quite frankly, the musical equivalent to a torture session. It's long and brutally painful to listen to, where nothing flows togehter well. Metaphorically speaking, this song feels like an alarm bell going off every 30 secounds. I mean it's just extremly stressful to listen to and actually gives me anxeity, and not in a metal way where the song hits me with adrenaline and it fills me with excitment and a feeling of triumph.

Sonically, this album is latin rock mixed in with jazz fushion. If this was more of a instrumental project, it would be way more tolerable. And now that leads me to the worst part of this album and that is the vocals...

And then we have the vocals, I don't know what in the actual fuck happened to Cedric. But he dosen't sing like how he did in At The Drive In. Instead, here Cedric sounds like a slowly dying cat who is getting impaled by a icicle, he is doing this whispering I don't know if he is trying to sound seductive or what, but it sounds awful and makes me feel quite nauesous.

But overall this album is It's way too chaotic and lacks any semblence of a musical structure to it, it just comes out as a complete and utter chaotic and uncohesive mess.

A truly ablysmal display of poorly constructed, head-ache inducing and truly horrendous prog-rock. I truly think this is the worst prog-rock album I've ever had the utmost displeasure of listening to.

Favourite Tracks: The Widow.

Least Favourite Tracks: Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore, Cassandra Geminni.

1/10.

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