I recently read somewhere that The Mars Volta insist that they're not a prog-rock band. You could forgive a humble music reviewer like myself for coming under the wrong impression, seeing as their previous album, "De-loused In The Comatorium" came with an elaborate concept, a lot of 6+ minute songs, and a good deal of extended instrumental wankery. That sounds more or less like it's supposed to be prog-rock to me, but what would I know?

Despite the stylistic self-denial that the band has, "De-loused In The Comatorium" was actually a pretty interesting album. Not necessarily a good album; indeed, it was actually pretty deeply flawed, but it was at least creative and imaginative. It's impossible to deny that Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez are brilliant musicians, and they played brilliantly. The only drawbacks were the godawful lyrics (which my fellow Halo-17 reviewer Craig Franklin elegantly summed up in his review of the album as "cryptic babble", and the predilection of the band to abandon such concepts as melody and song structure, and go for an extended jam session which would add nothing to the song. Unfortunately, these two critical flaws have both been amplified on "Frances The Mute", to the degree that the album is almost unlistenable in parts.

To start with, the album contains a mere five songs, which run for a total of more than seventy-five minutes. This wouldn't be a problem if these five songs were varied and interesting enough actually to carry themselves through, but unfortunately, they are not. Even Pink Floyd, who specialised in creating extended soundscapes, usually drew the line at about the forty minute mark. The extended runtime makes "Frances The Mute" sound bloated and swollen, because there's probably only about thirty minutes of decent music actually on here. When the band occasionally come up with something concise, the effect is mesmerising, such as on Widow, the shortest track here, which they manage to stuff into a mere six minutes, but for the most part, songs like Cygnus... Vismund Cygnus are stuffed full of endless jams that just don't add anything at all to the song, the story, or the album.

The other problem, that of the infamous "cryptic babble", is also on full display here. I wonder whether it's even intentional, because the band's "Tremulant" EP didn't display any of the horrifyingly terrible half-rhymes or nonsensical prattle that this album does. "There was a frail syrup dripping off his lap-danced lapel, punctuated by her decrepit prowl/ She washed down the hatching, gizzard soft as a mane of needles." is a terrible sequence no matter how you look at it. "I've always wanted/To eat glass with you again/But I never know how to talk without/Walls dropping on the eve" is equally awful. It would be easy to write this sort of third-rate poetry off as isolated incidences of lyrical excess, if it weren't for the fact that there are a hundred examples just as bad as this scattered throughout the album.

All of this leaves only instrumental brilliance to save the album. Unfortunately, while "De-loused In The Comatorium" showed off Cedric and Omar's instrumental virtuosity in an accessable and agreeable way, this album does nothing of the sort. The majority of the jams consist of nothing but washes of noise and guitar junk that any teenager with a distortion pedal can crank out. Even when they cut loose, such as in the introduction to Cygnus... Vismund Cygnus, the instrumentation might be impressive, but it's still boring.

I really was hoping that The Mars Volta would fix up some of the flaws that marred their first album, and deliver the killer album that they've been promising for years. Unfortunately, what they delivered instead was more of the same self-indulgent masturbatory garbage that they've been putting out for years, and now that the novelty has worn off, "Frances The Mute" becomes quite a tiring exercise.