INFINITY DRIPS

Glad to be hearing Omar going back to some utterly deranged songwriting on this release, easily being one of the most immediately bizarre sounding albums not just of the IPECAC lineup but of his entire career. There are a lot of albums in ORL's discography that sound somewhat strange and dissonant, but Infinity Drips goes the extra step and throws his entire repertoire of techniques at the listener, with the vocal deliveries clashing hard with the frenetic music, all with frequent detours into going entirely off the rails and short droning sections which often is nothing more than him coming up with some noise and letting it play out for a bit of time, usually jumping back into the madness without missing a beat. I really appreciate how he not only crafted one of his most avant-garde collection of tracks here, but further differentiated it from his other similarly challenging albums with the influence of Arabic music causing this to have an extremely unique sound to it, especially when he's spending half the time sounding as if he's beating all the instruments to death at once. I love the way it all plays out, especially on the shorter tracks like Tania Borealis which manage to fit in a bunch of transitions while being pretty accurately described as "Terri slowly singing while the entire backing group of instruments are thrown down the stairs at once."

Despite my love for this one however, it's also not quite the place that I'd recommend someone to start, simply because it feels like a culmination of past ideas that have been pushed to their limit, the kind of thing that's more interesting to hear after listening to certain past experiments to see how they've been further expanded and distorted in this instance. The main comparisons I can draw are how the vocals are used, since even though different vocalists were on both Xenophanes and Bosnian Rainbows, there's always been a sense of dissonance in how they've been handled, creating a sense of contrast rather than harmony, and this album feels like that idea pushed to its natural limit, with said vocals barely being connected to anything else that's going on, never quite melding together cleanly on a base level, but always getting close to it. Similarly, I really like seeing the way the drone tracks are handled here, feeling like the logical extension of albums like Despair or the one with Jeremy Michael Ward, only I actually like these ones and feel cleverly integrated as a way to stop the experience of this being a constant aural bombardment. More than anything I'm just thrilled that Omar Rodriguez Lopez continues to have albums that feel so fresh and exciting as this one, definitely would give this one a shot after a few of his others, namely Xenophanes, Cryptomnesia, and funnily enough, a couple of tracks off Despair despite that one not really being my cup of tea.