the lyric writing process to "Time Off". Omar Rodríguez-López stated in an interview with Switch Magazine that the word "Amputechture" (a portmanteau of amputate, technology , and architecture) was coined by the late Jeremy Ward. The liner notes of The Mars Volta's previous album Frances the Mute feature a credit for "Amputekthure" under the "published by" credits, Cedric Bixler-Zavala's name under the ASCAP corporation. The word also appeared in the storybook accompanying De-Loused in the Comatorium. Artwork Unlike The Mars Volta's first two albums, Amputechture contains no original artwork; the background of each page in the album booklet is a section of Jeff Jordan's "Big Mutant", itself inspired by an image of Robert H. Goddard and his colleagues holding a rocket. In addition the CD art itself is "Dwarf Dancing", also by Jeff Jordan. The artwork was originally to be done by Storm Thorgerson, who designed the covers for their first two albums, De-Loused in the Comatorium and Frances the Mute. His cover featured a picture of a woman standing in a field warding off the presence of a giant floating skull decorated in a mirrorball fashion. "They had wanted it to threaten a nun," Thorgerson told Classic Rock. "We preferred Romany, the wild gypsy girl who is telling the mirrored mask to 'sod off'." For reasons unknown, the band was unhappy with the outcome and used Jeff Jordan's art instead. Nonetheless, Thorgerson told Classic Rock in 2009 that "our last direct encounter with The Mars Volta – in the form of the bizarrely shaped Omar Rodriguez-López – was very friendly and touching." Reception The album has a score of 61 out of 100 from Metacritic, indicating "generally favorable reviews"; Amputechture is the band's lowest scored studio album on the website. Slant Magazine gave the album a score of four stars out of five and said it "shows a band honing their eruptive sound and bringing it into tight focus for the first time, routinely pushing their music to the wall without ever risking a breach." Punknews.org gave it a score of three-and-a-half stars out of five and praised the band for "producing a solid 76 minutes of actual music, and perhaps their most dynamically diverse performance since De-Loused. The album also sees a reduction in the dependence on concept, with Cedric's lyrics following more of a thematic arc than following a single storyline. The resulting lyrics enabled him to