I bought a new CD player to go along with the new headphones, and popped in the mesmerizing red disc. I was the first person in HMV on March 2005 when The Mars Volta’s “Frances The Mute” hit store shelves. Maybe, but I knew for sure that The Mars Volta were serious about their craft, and I’d need to buy their next album “Frances the Mute” upon the first day of its release. After experiencing the album, I wondered if The Mars Volta fell into the prog rock stereotype of being pretentious stoners. An alternate cover of “De-Loused in the Comatorium” visually represents the album’s protagonist Cerpin Taxt, and his comatose mind extending deeply into a realm unknown by physical reality. Progressive rock was not new to me, I’d listened to tons of Pink Floyd – and greatly appreciated that Floyd and TMV both had Storm Thorgerson design album covers – but the story of this record defied logic. I followed along with lyrics online and tried to decipher the concept album. I didn’t want to miss any note of this nightmare music. I went to HMV and bought The Mars Volta’s first album “De-Loused in the Comatorium.” While in the store, I saw a rack of headphones and bought an expensive pair. I woke up the next day with a new sense of purpose. This move was akin to the kind of career suicide Lou Reed hoped for on Metal Machine Music. The El Paso, Texas five-piece could have stuck around and rode the mid-2000s post-hardcore and metalcore popularity wave, but instead singer Cedric Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez decided on starting a progressive rock behemoth. For the next hour I searched online and discovered that The Mars Volta were half of the defunct band At The Drive-In. Something had opened inside of me, and I needed more. Right after the female DJ said, “That was The Mars Volta with The Widow,” I raced downstairs to the family computer. I couldn’t begin to understand the meaning behind the lyrics: “He’s got fasting black lungs / Made of clove splintered shards.” There was something dangerous and obscene about the song. It wasn't the elation of Freaks and Geeks’ Lindsay Weir listening to The Grateful Dead for the first time, it was more of an anxious fear. And finally, the voice oozed away in a manipulated mess. A distorted guitar solo rang through the song and dovetailed into shrill vocals. The rock instrumentals included a hint of Latin flare that I'd never heard on this station. The singer’s soft voice pulsed through a short verse, and exploded into a screech for the chorus. I sat up and tilted my head towards the cacophony. The first thirty seconds sounded like a mashup of traffic noise and a deranged dial-up modem. She said a brand-new song was coming up, something different.
After turning on the radio of my alarm clock, I heard the familiar weekday evenings girl of the local rock station. One particularly vapid evening after I was exhausted from reading One World Government conspiracy websites (yes, I was one of those strange kids), I went to bed around 9:00pm. I groggily commuted to the university campus every day, and wasn't fully awake until my classes were over, and it was time to take the train back home. I stayed up late most nights clicking through gaming websites and trying to watch videos on web players that never stopped buffering. And yet, somehow in the midst of this overindulgence, The Mars Volta created their most accessible song, The Widow, as a reminder that this band confounded expectations even when delivering excess.In early 2005 I was glad to finally be out of high school, but also apathetic to the humanities program I was taking in university. But there’s simply too much of everything here, meaning it’s not quite the match of its perfectly pitched predecessor. At its best it contains much of the band’s most hypnotically beautiful music (Cassandra Gemini) and slickest examples of genre-bending (L’Via L’Viaquez). And while they were subsequently cut into smaller pieces, meaning 12 tracks overall, that formalised the scope but couldn’t contain an album bursting at the seams with creativity – for good and for bad. This follow-up was the subject of some compromise, though, with the record label balking at the original plan for it to have only five tracks, with the final two being lengthy movements. What do you do if you’re a band with an incredibly uncommercial sound and your debut album becomes a commercial success? If you’re The Mars Volta then you push further, wider, deeper and stranger to see if those same fans follow you onwards and outwards.
