FRANCES THE MUTE

Sheesh! When you give somebody an inch, they certainly claw and fight to get that mile, don't they? Mars Volta had a good run with an album, so now it's a double album super rock opera that's thrice as convoluted and twice and esoteric. But that would all be much more horrid in the grand scheme if the band had forgotten what it mean to write interesting music. 'The Widow', It does a body warm to see some pups doing what they enjoy, when that hobby just so happens to have some vicious ingenuity to it ? not that they're reaching insurmountable heights, but when dealing with beavers we ask for river dams, not the Hoover dam (and only ever so rarely do we receive an Alberta dam).

Frances the Mute, by most rights, has little place in 2005, which was home to Eminem's rampant loss of humor, the rise in popularity of Katy Perry, and all that such and so. Why, then, was Frances loosed upon the world to rave reviews? I dunno, because I don't give it a rave review. It's friggin' overblown. 'Miranda' takes forever to become a thrilling number, and the buildup isn't fulfilled with the beginning of 'Cassandra Gemeni', but 'L'Via L'Viaquez' is a monster that just can't be topped. It's a searing hard latin rocker, sung completely in the native tongue ? which strikingly adds depth to the experience. It's raucous, charging, and undeniably energetic, but couldn't they have trimmed things down a few notches in the pomposity department?

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