Album review: Omar Rodríguez-López – Old Money

You know the name, even if you can’t place it – Omar Rodríguez-López is the guy whose wild guitar styles and, er, idiosyncratic songwriting go a long way to making The Mars Volta what they are… whatever that is. Old Money is apparently his eighth solo album since 2004 (eighth!), not including TMV albums or collaborations or as-yet-to-be-released projects. That’s one hell of a work ethic right there.

I’m not familiar with any of Rodríguez-López‘s other solo material, yet I am informed by the press release (and by friends who are) that it’s usually pretty obtuse. The press release goes on to say that Old Money is “perhaps the most accessible of his non-Volta recordings”; if that’s the case, the earlier material must be completely batshit insane.

Through the whole album, Rodríguez-López‘s guitar sound is omnipresent – although it rarely sounds like a typical rock guitar at all, having been cooked, twisted and mangled by a vast array of stomp boxes and studio gizmos; oily metal band-saws shimmer, glisten and scream, often morphing into death-ray synth bass patches or the howling of the interdimensional dead. Sometimes – almost shockingly – there are clean tones, brief moments of calm and clarity in the midst of a maelstrom of colour and darkness.

The driving atonal arpeggio riffs of The Mars Volta’s material are, quite naturally, present to some degree in Omar Rodríguez-López‘s solo stuff, but this is evidently where he gets to offload the material that’s too odd even for his main band. I’ll repeat that – Old Money is even more prog than The Bedlam in Goliath, so if you’re one of those who’ve gone stale on the recent Volta material, you’ll probably be happier for skipping this.

Meanwhile, those with a healthy tolerance for intricacy-for-intricacy’s-sake should step inside for a hallucinogenic journey through Rodríguez-López‘s brain. Alongside the blistering post-post-hardcore riffola are some seemingly random free-jazz multitonal expeditions, proggy time shifts, and zones of outright weirdness. The absence of vocals adds to Old Money‘s jazzy vibe, leaving the music to do the heavy lifting… which is something akin to the audio equivalent of watching a crew of ants trundling off with a rat carcass. Where much of what gets labelled prog is playful, Rodríguez-López‘s games are deadly and fast. You could easily break your neck… so, yeah. You’re gonna wanna strap on that helmet, boy.

Old Money is a relentless audio kaleidoscope, its underlying theme of corporate corruption strobe-lit by the weighty song titles. The dubby intro to “How to Bill the Bilderberg Group” gets streaked with mangled muezzin while Valium sci-fi G-funk keyboards glissando around the place like it was hosed down with olive oil; “I Like The Rockefeller’s First Two Albums, but After That…” is a mad filter-squeezed blues that you might play while waiting for the aliens to pick you up the morning after one of old Kyuss desert parties, complete with mangled Mexican radio crackling through the badly-shielded guitar cables; then, closing the album, the title track “Old Money” is like the bleary funked-up Sunday morning where you wake up to find you dreamed the whole damn thing.

Then there’s the languid and doped-out Mexican vibe of “Private Fortunes”, or the bit where “Trilateral Commission as Dinner Guests” ends with what sounds like an arcade game spaceship battle… the whole album is a total fucking maelstrom of everything but the kitchen sink, and it sets your fight-or-flight to pumping with its ability to keep surprising you time after time. But is Old Money really Omar Rodríguez-López‘s most accessible solo material yet? Sure, I guess.

Everything’s relative, after all.