The Mars Volta are one of those rare, select-few progressive rock bands that actually attain mainstream success(in this case, I'd guess it was mostly through their music video for The Widow).  They are also unique in that they blend the spirit of punk rock with progressive rock, two musical forms that are basically the complete opposite of one another.  Frances The Mute is their second album, and it proves to be much more ambitious than their second, with a grand total of just one song that's under 10 minutes.

First off, The Mars Volta are really showing off the progressive rock influences here, as you can hear a lot of Pink Floyd and King Crimson here and there while listening.  As cool as that is though, I don't really think that they have they have the idea of how to write songs down correctly.  That doesn't mean that all of the songs here suck; rather, there's a lot of great melodies but I guess they haven't really figured out how to make them all flow together well.

A perfect example of this is L' Via L' Viaquez, a fantastic, high-energy piece showcasing Cedric Bixler-Zavala's passionate vocals flitting back between English and Spanish, with some very poetic lyrics.  Basically, the main melody is played twice, once with the usual Mars Volta sound with some truly awe-inspiring guitar work, and then played again, except in a super-slow jazzy samba style.  While that is all well and good, the song ends with minutes and minutes of sound effects, with the vocals gradually becoming more distorted.  A lot of the songs on here are like that, and it really shows the lack of creativity on their part here.  You'd think that they find more creative ways to link the songs together, rather than just add a bunch of atmospheric sound effects that don't really serve to add to the music.

And the same could be said of all the songs on here as well.  Tons of great melodies(The Widow got stuck in my head for the longest time, haha), great musicianship all around, but the inclusion of all those pointless, and not to mention, long passages of random atmospheric sound effects and vocal distortion really take away from this album as a whole.