FRANCES THE MUTE
The Mars Volta
Fans like to debate which genre this space-rock art-funk salsa-prog group inhabits. But more crucial than what kind of band it is -- at least on this second full-length studio CD -- is what it is not: Restrained. Efficient. Willing to sacrifice creative gluttony for artistic effectiveness.
Mars Volta is insufferably self-indulgent on its latest release, "Frances the Mute."
(Sebastian Artz)
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"Frances the Mute" is five songs, with no silence in between. Three of the first four are more than 12 minutes long apiece. The last, "Cassandra Geminni," tops 32 minutes and probably won't be the next single. Appreciating the Mars Volta means owning headphones and having loads of time to kill.
It won't be leisure time. Weirdness guides this dark concept record about a guy seeking his biological parents. As soon as you get comfy during a moment of atmospheric trippiness, wild-eyed tenor Cedric Bixler-Zavala might squeal sweetly about raining maggots, or worms crawling out of your head. Or some dude will blast your face off with a saxophone.
Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez does a commendable job channeling Carlos Santana surviving an onstage seizure. But during the album's finest moments, his fiery ax shape-shifts into a creature that welcomes additional sustenance ranging from Doorsish psychedelic keyboards to horns, strings -- even Latin-jazz piano on the invigorating "L'Via l'Viaquez."
As often happens when songs get longer than TV sitcoms, the best jams are suffocated by the weight of this 77-minute marathon. The should-be-cool parts -- for example, Lucifer-creepy vocal effects giving way to chirping birds -- start to bore. It's encouraging that a major label puts out a group that's this gloriously self-indulgent. But only the most patient listener will get through "Frances" without once pressing mute.
-- Michael Deeds
NO WOW
The Kills
Every buzz-attracting retro-nuevo band has its thing, whether that's blown-apart blues, dreamy California pop or show-gazing with intensity. The Kills' thing is fuzz. The band's "No Wow" is fuzzier than a koala and almost as cuddly, in its prickly way.
Nasty rock about disillusioned love stripped down to its essential besotted rue, the songs here are thrum-driven, almost universally deployed at the same pace -- a supercharged stomp right out of your cheating heart. It's safe to say that model-glam singer VV (nee Alison Mosshart) has had some love trouble. From the title song to "I Hate the Way You Love," Parts 1 and 2, to "Dead Road 7" (take the highway instead), bad things happen to beautiful people. Her voice has some of Siouxsie Sioux's violent but controlled tremolo, but it's all sex, whereas the bony arrangements are all mind.
VV and the other member of the Anglo-American duo, Jamie Hince, known as Hotel, both play guitar (Hotel is also your man on drums), and they manage to make both guitars sound like basses. It's fist-pumping garage with occasional moments of gorgeous roadhouse rock, as on the love-is-a-western "Rodeo Town." For anyone who's been jerked around by love or misses fuzzy, buzzy, brain-wrecking early '60s rock, the Kills won't make you hear any better, but they will make you feel less alone.
-- Arion Berger
