Omargeddon #55: Is It The Clouds?

Omar Rodríguez-López’s most recent solo album Is It the Clouds? dropped January 2024 (aptly on the Clouds Hill label) and was the first to follow 2016-17’s epic release schedule. While it’s not quite a traditional concept album, themes of grieving and poor mental health are strong running motifs evident from the start. During a Spin magazine interview, he said “The record has a lot to do with the passing of my mother, but it is not as brutal as it would have been if I had done it back when she actually died…The sound of the album is pretty uniform, but the record has a bipolar feeling. That’s the paradox that is on this record, you’re losing the place where you came from, and while thinking that this will destroy you, exactly the opposite happens: You finally feel like a human being for the very first time. To finally have this feeling was the last gift she gave me.”

I’ve been around the thinking-about-thinking, C-D- and M-BT blocks enough times to recognise the adage (at this point, maybe more like a chestnut) that encourages people trapped in cycles of rumination and other negative thought patterns to imagine their thoughts as clouds in the sky, which may gather, darken, and roil but will eventually dissipate. Indeed, anyone experiencing poor mental health will be achingly familiar with this kind of inescapable advice, doled out with great frequency across social and traditional media, with varying degrees of sincerity. The titular opening track subverts this acceptance template by querying whether the clouds themselves are the cause of the problems and sets the tone and pace for the rest of the album. It’s a soft pop track punctuated with delicate, introspective notes supporting breathy vocals, with a rushed chorus, the query repeated with increasing pitch in a desperation to find answers yet almost as a deflection or a defence mechanism; if the words tumble out at pace, they might vanish along with the pain.

Lyrics on this album are so raw and vulnerable they read much like journal entries. “Rat Pain” opens with a bit of a loungey feel, then shifts to a near-plod when noting “I’ve given you all I’ve got” with a total lack of self-pity that isn’t so much resigned as it is the dawning of self-aware churlishness. The grief in “Gently Tamed” mourns the end of a relationship with a continuation of soft breathy vocals and muted drums measuring the beat of the time of a broken heart, and I wonder: can you ever truly heal when you’re still heavily invested in blaming the guilty party responsible for your pain? That’s not a rhetorical question; I genuinely want to know, even if I suspect the answer is “it depends”.

“Mere Centimeter” and “Which Came First” explore the kinds of facile advice and cerebral spin-outs that so often feature during times of mental duress. In the first example, taking a shower is suggested as a panacea for all ills, much in the way a cup of tea is offered to soothe broken hearts and limbs across the UK. The song wavers between the narrator’s proto-sulking and desperate self-assurance that he’s a good person, searching for blame, placing it on himself, and then projecting out again in an all-too-familiar cycle. “Which Came First” is an existential crisis presented in a series of nonsensical binary questions, delicately skating around a lovely bit of restrained shred and concluding, “Is this an expression of failure?” “Solving This Again” is a dulled response to the acknowledgment that spending an enormous amount of energy trying to fix someone else “in spite of my own health” results in two broken people.

The concept of breakage and repair is a trope that’s hard to avoid. Even when this is framed as a positive, as when compared with kintsugi, mental health is almost always presented in the context of fixing something that was broken. “Once a Broken Human” invents an axiom exactly as heartbreaking as it is untrue and yet is all too often wholly believed by anyone subscribed to the “Never Try Means Never Fail” school of depressive lies: “they say once a broken human / forever a hollow shell of abandoned dreams”. The soft backup sighing aaahs might represent the friends who stick around and try to deflect this kind of hateful self-talk or a Greek chorus sent to gee up the doom-spiral.

They Say-isms continue apace on “Amor Frio”, a song that also features on El Bien Y Mal Nos Une, which instructs us that “dicen que el amor es tan frio / hielo que acaricia a los muertos”. This version is so stark by comparison to El Bien that it could easily be a demo, consisting purely of unadulterated vocals and acoustic guitar. Every trilled r, every soft intake of breath and every hushed murmur is so honest and unflinching that the emotional volume is on full blast. This isn’t a perfectly polished piece, but it is no less powerful for it.