Mars Volta Guitarist Releases New Album

11/11/08 2:49pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

The Mars Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez will release a new solo album titled Old Money on Jan. 27 through Stones Throw Records.

If a downloadable version is good enough for you, that's available this week. The album was originally supposed to be The Mars Volta's follow-up to 2006's Amputechture, but it seemed out of place with singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala's vocals.

The disc is a concept album about crooked businessmen which has a sound that ranges from psychedelic rock to funk. Rodriguez-Lopez is joined on Old Money by former Mars Volta member Jon Philip Theodore and current members Adrian Terrazas-Gonzales, Juan Alderete and his brother, multi-instrumentalist Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez.

Rodriguez-Lopez released his first solo album, 2004's A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume One, as the accompanying score to a film he directed. He also intermittently released albums with the Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Quintet, and that band's latest disc is last year's The Apocalypse Inside Of An Orange. His latest solo record is the mostly instrumental Minor Cuts And Scrapes In The Bushes Ahead, which he originally only released on Minidisc for his close friends.

Here are the songs on Old Money:

"The Power Of Myth"
"How To Bill The Bilderberg Group"
"Population Council's Wet Dream"
"Private Fortunes"
"Trilateral Commission As Dinner Guests"
"1921"
"Family War Funding"
"Vipers In The Bosom"
"I Like Rockefellers' Two First Albums, But After That..."
"Old Money"