Omar Rodriguez -Lopez — Old Money

Old Money

Stones Throw/Koch

Erin Bell (CHARTattack)

01/30/2009 1:33pm

Mars Volta fans will eat up the experimental jazz-rock of Old Money. It's the latest solo effort from the band's guitarist and principal composer/arranger, who's also prolific and scarily talented. Heck, this basically is The Mars Volta, minus Cedric Bixler-Zavala's vocals. (Bixler-Zavala appears on the album, but behind the drum kit.)

Other current and past Mars Volta members that play on the disc include: bassist Juan Alderete; woodwinds player Adrian Terrazas-Gonzales; Rodriguez-Lopez's younger brother, Marcel, on percussion and synths; and Deantoni Parks and Jon Theodore, who trade off with Bixler-Zavala on drums.

Old Money is fueled by insistent rapid-fire percussion, a relentlessly driving bass and spazzy, atonal guitar work. The music is all instrumental, aside from heavily processed vocals that function more as instruments on a couple of the tracks. But with playful song titles like "How To Bill The Bilderberg Group," "Family War Funding (Love Those Rothchilds)" and my favourite, "I Like The Rockefellers' First Two Records, But After That...," you have to wonder what brilliance might have been had a vocalist been there to flesh out the titles with lyrics.

It's an ambitious project, and at times the density of the music seems almost overwhelming — a case of too much sound to take in all at once. At the same time, though, Old Money is more focused and less tangential than some of Rodriguez-Lopez's previous output. While The Mars Volta aren't afraid to indulge in some protracted soloing, the disc is refreshingly free of the lengthy (and, many have argued, self-indulgent) sound collage passages that Rodriguez-Lopez has experimented with in the past.

You get the sense that there's a solid master plan at work somewhere underneath Old Money's grandiosity, and it makes it easier to go along with Rodriguez-Lopez on whatever sonic joyrides he feels like tearing off into. "Vipers In The Bosom" shows he can be minimalist, too, when he wants to be.

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