EL GRUPO NUEVO DE OMAR RODRIGUEZ LOPEZ - CRYPTOMNESIA

For "Cryptomnesia", Omar Rodriguez Lopez arranged one of the best line-ups I've ever seen, of course you get absolutely awesome Omar on guitar, Cedric Bixler Zavala, providing as usual devilish vocals, and Juan Alderete from The Mars Volta, and Jonathan Hischke and Zach Hill from Hella, and damn, Zach Hill can play, he is like this crazy machine gun with an incredible sense of timing, it's an animal.

Concerning the music this album kind of disappointed me, after seeing the line up, acknowledging it was math rock and reading good reviews, I expected some sonic crazy music really addicting, well, that is not completely untrue but most of the songs are kind of "dead", for example, "Half Kleptos" has a crazy introducing chorus but then the music just dies! I find it very hard to find a melody in the verse, which is a shame, same goes for songs like "Cryptomnesia" or "Tuberculoids", where it's very hard to find something to hold on to. Also, the music has at some points the very worst thing of math rock, directionless cacophony, and that's kind of bothering too.

As for the good part, well as I mentioned, "Half Kleptos" has one amazing, addicting chorus, the middle songs from "Puny Humans" to "Paper Cunts" are also very good, and have some interesting "track" structure, as the songs continue over to other tracks, which is cool, and Omar gets crazy on "Warren Oates" solo, which is really mind blowing.

What I feel about this record is that it could've been so much better, it should have been re-thought before it was released, and also the production is kind of disturbing, I had to get 320kbps mp3 to be at peace with what I was hearing.

This deserves 3,5 stars, I can't do that, so 3 stars it is.