Hooray! Finally, after ‘breaking a decade of omertà,’ the eponymous new Mars Volta album is here! I’ve been hoping for this moment for so long, and yet now that it’s finally happened, I’ve been weirdly reluctant to listen as obsessively as[…]

When I started this project four years ago, I said Maybe by the time I finish, the Mars Volta will have confirmed their reunion, complete with a triple-album release and world tour starting with a week’s residency in London. I can dream!
IT’S HAP[…]

Friends, so far 2022 has been exactly as lousy as it is brilliant, both on a personal and a global scale. And while I do feel somewhat obligated to keep well-informed about current events, they’re far too packed with the constant rollback of basic […]

Despite the fact that I haven’t listened to an actual, physical CD in many years, a select few hold an almost talismanic power over me. Unfortunately, after various flat-decantings over the years, my once-alphabetised CD collection has become consi[…]

There comes an inevitable moment during every long, pointless passion project when a person begins to seriously question why it seemed like such a good idea. I passed this point during the first lockdown, when, like many others, I was both fascinated[…]

On 5 May 2017, I took another step into my fifth decade. The celebrations began with a massive brunch, the centrepiece of which was a ridiculous freakshake, because 2017. Then I met some of my chums in the pub and then had another restaurant meal for[…]

During the acute phase of the pandemic last year, I noticed quite a few demo albums were dropping into my Spotify feed. As much as I enjoy partaking in a kind of VH1 Behind the Music-style history lesson, I’m sure it was a direct result of musician[…]

I’ve been especially drawn to instrumentals of late; I’m certain that this is because I haven’t worked in an open-plan office for well over a year and can easily listen to music uninterrupted for nearly the whole of my working day. Lyrics mean […]

Omar Rodríguez-López song and album titles are some of the very best in existence, and it really doesn’t get much better than Gorilla Preacher Cartel. According to an early release schedule*, this was revised from the originally proposed Scrapyar[…]

Since the beginning of his solo career, song reworkings and rearrangements have appeared frequently across Omar Rodríguez-López’s oeuvre. Samples and sequences recur on most of his electronic music, and many of the spacey instrumentals that featu[…]