My attitude to creative writing projects is best contextualised by misquoting Zapp Brannigan’s take on pick-up lines: write as many of them as you can, as fast as you can. I know this is probably unwise, yet I feel compelled to start a project goin[…]

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 gri[…]

As much as this idea totally whips, sadly, Sworn Virgins isn’t a concept album centred around the priestesses of Vesta, although it did inspire me to draft a fantasy longlist of musicians I’d like to see approach such a project.* As the very firs[…]

Hooray for me! Also several others, but it’s hard to get excited about that. Lucro sucio; Los ojos del vacio, the long-awaited Mars Volta double album I totally manifested is here at last, and it is a delightful compendium of traditional Puerto Ric[…]

The Jeopardy! category is “Before and After”: ANSWER: They’ll use semiconductor technology to amass an army for hire, if the remuneration is right. QUESTION: Who are Solid State Mercenaries? Why yes, I have been sitting on that one for near[…]

I’m inclined to think of Omar Rodriguez as the first official ORL solo record, even though that’s not technically correct. And yet, my predilection for proving myself to be the best kind of correct is overridden when I consider a couple of fact[…]

Labelling music as ‘psychedelic’ is about as useful as labelling it as ‘progressive’. Both are wildly subjective terms, and both are frequently deployed when defining Omar Rodríguez-López’s extensive catalogue. I’d like to see a handy […]

Friends, this year is going to be a doozy, one which will require mental fortitude on par with the strength of Hercules combined with the flexibility of Gumby. And yet there’s only much loin-girding a person can reasonably do, so instead I’m dete[…]

This is not my best-loved time of year: it’s cold, dark and tainted by too many unhappy holiday memories. All the decorations remind me of when I was very young, and how I dreaded the annual construction of our plastic fir tree, anticipating my dad[…]

If I really wanted to – and I don’t – I could fall down a rabbit hole reading various essays and blog posts about the death of the album. But for the sake of simplicity (and laziness), let’s say the first knell sounded shortly after t[…]