Frances The Mute -- The Mars Volta

I am the kind of pretentious privileged upper-middle class white male that prides emself (sic) on not listening to hard rock, preferring the less wall-of-sound varieties. I am the kind of pretentious fancier-of-self-being-no-more-than-a-thoroughly-hubris'd-human-and-subject-to-the-base-impulses-thereof person that prides emself on not listening to prog rock, discrediting it as only for those caught up in illusions of grandeur, and of art as a mystical experience, preferring rather the simple, catchy, still-less-mainstream hooks of Good Shoes or White Rabbits.  Most of all, I am the kind of arrogant skeptical, cynical, unwilling postmodernist that condemns "experimental", "artsy" music, preferring something simply enjoyable.  Frances the Mute, then, rubs against just about every grain that I have... And I found it immensely, complexly enjoyable.  From the first four minutes of banging on pipes with amelodic tones in the background in the titular track, to the compelling, catchy theme at the start of "The Widow," that remains only rarely repeated, tauntingly; from the ragingly loud riffs scattered here and there, to the relaxed latin salsa of L'Via L'Viaquez; from the excessively mixed meter, to the presence of synth and overproduction of the sound, to the raw emotion and the fact that you don't notice a song transition until the album is over: Frances the Mute is the odyssey of an album that a balladic prog rock artist can only hope to achieve, if they ever aspire to relevance to an audience that prides itself on more than just esoterica.  This album was originally only 6 tracks, but the distributor required The Mars Volta to split some of the tracks up in order for it to be able to be released as an album rather than as an EP.  Many copies of this album come without the first track included, as it is otherwise too long to fit on a single CD.  The titles of the songs in this album come from the names of people in a diary found in the back seat of a car being processed by a friend of the artists who worked as a repo man, that told a story of a man's search for his biological parents.  That's how artsy, prog-rocky this album is.  Even so, though, the hauntingly natural mix of English and Spanish in the vocals, as overproduced as it is, manages to lend a certain irresistible familiarity to the album as a whole, weaving one entire narrative, only partially comprehensible, forcing one to consider the vocals as simply another instrument, often, rather than as a conveyor of sense.  Many albums are interesting, fun, well-put together, and intriguing.  This album, though, in the words of someone wise before their time, is the kind of album that a few times a year, you just want to turn off all the lights, lie down on a mattress, and actively listen to, letting the sound wash over and through you, for one and a half glorious hours.