どういたしまして

While all the songs here might be taken from past albums, どういたしまして contains glimpses of my preferred sort of live album for the way it's able to take a collection of pre-existing songs and then put an entirely unique spin on them, recontextualising their foundations to make for a completely different experience. While this particular era of Omar where Ximena would play a prominent role in his music all has a couple of pretty consistent points, whether it's the vocal style or the general gravitation towards slightly more stripped back, simple pop structures or the consistently lethargic, surreal atmosphere the music as a whole is able to bring to the table. You tended to know the general ballpark in which a lot of his albums would fall, even if the sound palette to complement these core ideas would often be wildly different, take Solar Gambling and put it next to Tychozorente as an example, and while to some extent that's true here as well, there are moments of something far more interesting that occasionally peek through and show off a very different side of this all. The spacier, more distorted elements of the album are really what especially stand out to me, often bringing a new, more expansive element to the atmosphere present, peaking with this version of El Todo which reigns far supreme over the already rather good original version. The way these cold, dreary tones clash with such warm and beautiful melodies ends up making for a true standout in ORL's entire catalogue and if all the album would've so strongly committed to this style, we'd have one of his best albums in general. As it stands though it's still very worth a listen, as while a lot of these tracks aren't especially earth shattering if you know what's coming already, the way that a lot of the tracks are reimagined is really neat to hear and I just wish that it fully went into this idea and elevated all the tracks in the same way as El Todo, because as it stands this feels almost like something I'd give someone for them to get a rough idea of the Ximena era without fully diving into a bunch of messy, garish albums immediately. Check it out by all means, it's a good starting point for this, but I'd hesitate to be able to call it essential either.