The Mars Volta: Frances The Mute

Herald rating: * * * * *

This album should be illegal. On their second album, Mars Volta create a musical map to take you on a trip of your own making. But Frances the Mute's mind-altering tendencies make it a beautiful thing. It's less emotional than the band's excellent yet hard-going debut album De-Loused in the Comatorium, from 2003, which documented the life and suicide of friend and artist Julio Venegas.

Have they toned it down a bit? Not at all. But while this latest, five song, 76-minute album is just as inventive, out-there and intense, it's not as bogged down in a concept. It is mad. And crazy.

Lyrics about maggot rain and heaven just being a scab away are dished up by singer Cedric Bixler Zavala, who is part tenor, part Bjork, and part funky soldier. "Come on now," he urges us on opener Cygnus ... Vismund Cygnus.

The mix of free jazz, flailing guitar and their love of hardcore makes for some difficult grooves, but what the Mars Volta do is unbelievably funky.

L'Via L'Viaquez, sung in Spanish and English, goes from a slow polka to a psychedelic freak-out to bombastic rock'n'roll within seconds, while The Widow is gloriously slow and swaggering.

Then, the last track, the mammoth 30-minute-plus Cassandra Gemini, conjures up the acid visions of William Burroughs or the late Hunter S. Thompson.

It moves in and out of drum massacres, bellows of saxophone and ambience, while all the time keeping up an incredibly catchy tune, thanks mostly to a recurring guitar groove of Led Zeppelin proportions. Then, 27 minutes after the song snared you, that groove comes back subtly with squalls of saxophone and Zavala imploring us to "sink your teeth into the flesh of midnight".

You could argue that Frances the Mute loses its way slightly with the ambient interludes - like the tweeting birds. But it's an album of movements rather than songs, and most will welcome these quiet reprieves from the afro-adorned brains of Bixler and producer/guitarist Omar A Rodriguez-Lopez.

The one thing better than hearing Frances the Mute is the thought of somewhere, somehow, seeing this album performed live. Make a date.

Label: Universal