Elsewhere, ‘L’ Via L’ Viaquez’ slips from hard rock to slinky samba then back to cracked blaxploitation and dissonant skronk, concluding with an electric flamenco flourish. It’s as if ‘Sketches Of Spain’ had been revived by one of Miles’s later fusion bands with one eye on stadium rock and the other on ‘Trout Mask Replica.’ As for the closing 24-minute ‘Cassandra Geminni’, with its Coltrane ascensions, it would take about a month to properly digest and describe its labyrinthine cells and chambers.

So there’s no middle ground. If you buy into this, you’re just gonna have to indulge The Mars Volta their sprawling ambitions. Yes, entire passages of ambient atmospheres and exercises in electronic sound manipulation could’ve been edited from the mix without incurring much damage, but those Roger Dean slurs miss the point. The Storm Thorgerson artwork, the titles, the way the tracks are broken up into movements, plus the overarching theme (‘Frances…’ is based on a notebook found by deceased MV FX man Jeremy Ward, detailing the anonymous diarist’s search for his birth parents) – these are merely cosmetic. The Mars Volta are as plugged into the dark heart of gothic Mexican duende and bordertown punk as they are King Crimson and ‘Physical Graffiti.’ Cedric’s lyrics are not meditations on hobgoblins and fairies so much as apparitional bad trips through vistas of tombstone teeth, snake eyes, black lungs, crawling bugs and crucifixes.

As I write, message boards are buzzing with debate over this album, with even faithful followers struggling to get their chops around its ungainly bulk. Understandably enough, some folk still hanker after ‘At The Drive-In’s’ furious tautologies. I know I do. But give it time. This is a long day’s journey across topographies populated with grinning skeletons bedecked in feathers and top hats. ‘Frances The Mute’ bristles with hallucinatory imaginative powers, and, in parts, a sort of genius.

Later for that three-minute garage rock record.

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.