I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s taken me so long to get into Amputechture. It was released right in the throes of my first obsession with the group: I had heard De-Loused in the Comatorium just a year earlier, and it exploded my mind. A friend had burned me a copy of Frances the Mute over the summer, and I would often leave the albums playing on repeat in my dorm room.

So why would I not immediately devour the follow-up? In my memory, I didn’t hear Amputechture until after I had moved home from Chicago in late 2009. At that time, I had bought into the hipster snob narrative that the Mars Volta was a bloated, overindulgent prog rock outfit that released two great albums. The inflated vinyl prices on the later albums didn’t give me much incentive to challenge that notion.

But the most recent batch of reissues happened to coincide with some extra playing around money, so I figured I might as well fill in the gap in my collection between Frances and Octahedron. 

And boy, am I glad I did.

As much as I love the first two records, they really couldn’t be more different. De-Loused is—comparably speaking—a tight and focused juggernaut of neo-prog formidability. Frances is loose and meandering, indulging every noodly impulse across five songs and eighty minutes (though allegedly not a single note was improvised). I had previously written off both Amputechture and The Bedlam In Goliath as too noodly and unfocused to be enjoyable (Frances was noodly, but focused). But revisiting them with kinder ears, this is absolutely not the case.

This record is the first Mars Volta record that doesn’t have a unifying lyrical narrative—not that you can decipher the stories of the first two records without some careful handholding. Instead, the lyrics touch on more grounded themes, like immigration, the coldness of an increasingly technology-dominated society, and a news story Cedric Bixler saw about (checks notes) possessed nuns. But in traditional Bixler fashion, the lyrics largely sound like nonsense, like “My heart is darkclots, leap year is late / How did you get here?” But when delivered through his impossibly high voice, you barely care.

Musically though, this might be the most unified the group has ever been. Omar Rodriguez-López’s guitar lines are as third-eye opening as ever, while his composition and production work is buoyed by an aggressive horn section, occasional electronics, and liberal sonic manipulation. The songs play through the seventy-six minutes without stopping (each side of the vinyl end with a locked groove). The songs are long—the longest, “Tetragrammaton” is almost seventeen minutes—and inject a variety of styles into their prog rock. Opener “Vicarious Atonement” pays homage to Led Zeppelin with a bluesy dirge. “Meccamputechture” features a huge funk horn line and dub reggae intermission. “Asilos Magdalena” spends most of its runtime as an acoustic Latin ballad. “Viscera Eyes” is big and riffy, pointing to its origin as a song intended for At the Drive-In (ATDI bassist Paul Hinojos jumped ship from the other ATDI fragment Sparta to join TMV on this record). “Day of the Baphomets” (adapted from an unreleased song from De-Loused is full prog/psych maximalism, with every player flexing their chops like some sort of musical Arnold Schwarzenegger Bodybuilding Classic.

While the extended instrumental passages, constant shifts in meter and tempo, and constant chops-flexing might test the patience of anyone looking for a catchy chorus, that’s not why anyone listens to The Mars Volta. De-Loused didn’t expand my consciousness with infectious hooks and tight three-minute run times. Frances didn’t grab my attention because I could sing along with it. I obsessed over those records because they showcased some of the most impressive performances and compositions I had ever heard. And while Amputechture might not do much to expand on the greatness of those first two records, it definitely keeps the ball rolling in a satisfying way. And if you ask me, that’s more than enough.