Pitchfork

You'd think playing in a band as willfully eclectic and excessive as the Mars Volta would provide Omar Rodriguez with enough of an outlet to satiate whatever prog/samba/psych/funk/jazz/metal jones that needed a-fixin'. But Please Heat This Eventually-- the second in an ongoing series of solo albums-- actually feels less like an indulgence to feed his pretensions than a concession to the passive Mars Volta fan (if such an animal exists) who could do without the convoluted conceptual storylines and schizoid time-signature shifts and with more straight-forward grooving and shredding.

Of course, in Mars Volta vernacular, "straight-forward" is a relative concept: Please Heat This Eventually is a single 25-minute jam, split over two sides of vinyl, and divided somewhat arbitrarily into six parts (denoted, as per prog tradition, with Roman numerals). And the album's guest vocalist-- Damo Suzuki-- is not one known for concision and clarity. As frontman for krautrock kings Can in the early 1970s and, more recently, with his open-door Damo Suzuki Network (essentially a hastily assembled band of musicians from whatever town the singer happens to be playing in), Suzuki has dealt not so much in lyrics as incantations that drift in and out of decipherability as the rhythm coheres and crashes.

And yet, Please Heat This Eventually is surprisingly beholden to a linear structure: After a brief 90-second prologue of synth squiggles (courtesy of Money Mark Nishita) and foreshadowing vocal fragments, the piece locks into a boisterous blaxploitation-funk rhythm track and sustains it for most of the album's duration. Though Rodriguez and Suzuki get the marquee billing, you gotta give the drummer Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez some, and even more to bassist Juan Alderete, whose steady 10-note pulse mostly keeps the piece's subway locomotion from going off the rails.

The opening stretch finds Suzuki-- sounding far more Cookie Monster-gruff than his more mystical Can performances-- playing call and response with Rodriguez's frenetic guitar fills, which, compared to his Mars Volta work, are more Zappa than Zeppelin. As expected, Suzuki's words are indecipherable and of indeterminate language, though they are grouped in discernible verses and choruses, the latter of which are underscored with some overdriven guitar squall. But the collaboration really starts living up to its heady promise around the eight-minute mark, when Rodriguez's playing dissolves into more droning and textural shapes, Suzuki breaks from form and enters crazy-homeless-guy rant mode, and saxophonist Adrian Terrazas-Gonazales starts squawking away, pushing PHTE into the same ominous environs as Miles Davis' On the Corner and The Stooges' Fun House.

This creeping tension carries over to the opening minutes of side two, after which, the rhythmic backbone finally breaks under the pressure and the whole enterprise goes down in a hail of pained guitar squeals and spasmodic sax bleats. This would seem like a logical place to end the track, but instead, Rodriguez and crew take a sharp left turn into a four-minute flute-folk pastorale. Now any monster jam like this needs to ebb and flow, but this breakdown feels particularly forced, as if the players weren't sure where to take the piece and decided to take an aesthetic coffee break instead. Throughout this lull, snippets of Suzuki's voice intrude into the mix, as if he's trying to wake everyone up. But it takes a woozy Nishita synth solo to gradually work the band up back to full strength for the piece's final minute, which summons Suzuki for one last bark through the chorus and brings the piece to a full-circle conclusion-- a tidy payoff, but one that's not quite worth trudging through PHTE's drawn out second act to get there.