Unlike the dozens of bands I stumble upon these days, I can still remember the very first time I listened to The Mars Volta way back in 2005 – it was also the moment I became a music nerd for life.
I was an impressionable eighth grader walking around Pentagon City Mall with a fresh copy of the band’s sophomore record, Frances the Mute, spinning in my CD player and an unquenchable desire to find a sound that matched my unrefined tastes.
Up to that point, it was as if every band I enjoyed was either rife with dead members or hopelessly decommissioned. Moving on from 1990s alternative rock groups, my newfound dedication to the divisive “progressive rock” genre had recently evolved from a tenuous infatuation with Pink Floyd into days of studying Peter Gabriel-era Genesis records and participating in one-man late-night marathons listening to Yes’ Close to the Edge.
As great as my progressive rock catalogue was becoming, nearly all the best material had come out of the 1970s. I found myself seeking something current – music I could call my own and point to as proof that my generation’s sounds were as good as the music from the previous century.
Asking friends for guidance got me nowhere – everyone I knew was busy drooling over Kanye West or 50 Cent, and my sister’s cool older friends could only talk about interesting but totally different acts such as Interpol, LCD Soundsystem and Animal Collective.
Of all things, a Target commercial advertising the superstore’s sale of the new Mars Volta album caught my attention – 20 seconds of red on white computer graphics with singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala screaming in the background. I had never heard of this band, but after a quick Internet search I knew I had to hear this album.
As a rising high school student destined for a few lonely years of musical pretentiousness, it’s no surprise that a record like Frances the Mute – just five songs in 76 minutes – would pique my interest. I wasn’t interested in hip-hop or indie tropes – instead, I wanted epic-length tracks with twisting, long-winded instrumentals and dense lyrical non sequiturs.
Unsurprisingly, Frances the Mute floored me. Dancing spastically through punk and salsa and experimental noise, the album is a whirlwind of avant-garde ideas processed through songwriter and lead guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s sense of hard rock, post-hardcore and pop hooks.
Between the aggressive, earworm chorus of opening number “Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus” and the first thunderous moments of 32-minute highlight “Cassandra Gemini,” I still can’t help but feel a giddy excitement every time I cue the record up in iTunes.
Even better than enjoying Frances the Mute is understanding how it affected the way I listen to music. After surviving, accepting and coming to love the relative insanity of the record, I was suddenly discovering and accepting a much wider range of music than I ever had before.
Other music has certainly been more bizarre, and several more albums are simply better overall listening experiences than this record, but Frances the Mute will always have a special place in my catalogue because of its role in blowing the doors off my expectations of where music could go and what it could be.
berman@umdbk.com