To say that a new type of lockdown music has entered the swollen ranks of hyper-specific genres is clearly inaccurate, but I think it’s also safe to say that what is being released during this time has a unifying theme. I’m hearing a lot of frust[…]

I recently reread Elena Ferrante’s excellent Neapolitan quartet with the same obsessive passion that consumed me when I read it the first time. It’s a sprawling Bildungsroman packed with evocative characters and slow-burn plotlines that, even on […]

Wikipedia has been a blessing and a curse for the Omargeddon project. On the one hand, it’s brilliant for stuff like release dates, personnel and links to interviews. On the other, some of the data is patchy, as when noting and linking previous ver[…]

Despite knowing that attempting to construct a linear timeline for the solo work of Omar Rodríguez-López is a self-confessed fool’s errand, I’m nothing if not stubborn and continue to obsessively trace connections across songs and albums. I’v[…]

I’ve been categorising Omar Rodríguez-López’s solo recordings into three distinct, non-equal eras. Early ORL spans from 2004-2009, mostly consisting of experimental jams that were often reappropriated as Mars Volta songs. The middle period from[…]

2009 was a prolific year for Omar Rodríguez-López, with a total of six albums released. Cryptomnesia and Xenophanes are comprised of material that was originally intended for the Mars Volta but took a left turn at Albuquerque. Solar Gambling featur[…]

There are some musicians whose stage presence is so powerful, it creates a visual tunnel around them, making it nigh on impossible to pay attention to anyone else. Cedric Bixler-Zavala has it with his slinky salsa moves and microphone swinging. Jack […]

Back in the day, I had a very fixed idea of what an Omar Rodríguez-López album should sound like. I was still in recovery from the rockism that had clouded and limited my horizons since I was a teenager, and often struggled to identify what it was […]

Since I started the Omargeddon project, I’ve been paying less overt attention to new music, both new-to-me and newly released material. In fact, my sole contribution to the FT Readers’ Poll was Janelle Monae’s “Pynk”, totally forget[…]

There’s the Mars Volta and there’s the Mars Volta Group, and it’s important to understand the difference between the two. The Mars Volta is the partnership of Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala, and the Mars Volta Group is the evol[…]