Mars Volta - Frances The Mute CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

Bixler-Zavala's images of flayed skin and maggot rain were inspired by a diary found in a car by band member Jeremy Ward: an orphan's story of the search for his biological parents. It is easy to hear the band's own anguish, too (Ward died in 2003, of a drug overdose), in Rodriguez-Lopez's homicidal guitar seizures and Bixler-Zavala's high, wrenched tenor -- the closest thing in post-rock to Robert Plant's banzai-blues wail in Led Zeppelin. The album's excessive earphone theater and contrary mood jolts (like the Cuban-jazz languor in "L'Via L'Viaquez") may make you impatient. But in both the terse fire of "The Widow" (5:50) and the thrilling eternity of "Cassandra Gemini" (32:32), the Mars Volta show off an intensity of focus -- on hooks that kill and the cleansing powers of thundering whiplash -- that will drive your devils from the room as you're pinned to the wall.

Anyone doubting the Mars Volta's ability to make progressive rock a volatile and valid art form in 2005 needs to hear this. It's operatic, thematic metal crossed with hardcore, then sprinkled with surreal lyrics and headphone madness. It's like Radiohead, the Flash Gordon soundtrack and Fugazi all rolled in one.