SWORN VIRGINS

A wonderful little melting pot of a lot of the more energetic ideas that have appeared time and time again throughout ORL's career, all put through this lens of relative accessibility. Where the sounds played here might still be as abrasive and insane as they often tend to be, the song structures and abundance of hooks make for a very memorable and digestible listen that makes this one of the better places to jump into to start out. It's a pretty deceptively eclectic mix of ideas as well, even if it initially seems pretty straightforward due to everything having a similar sound absolutely drenched in psychedelia and distortion. In particular I found it pretty interesting to see a bit of an alternative rock tinge to some of the ideas present here, especially in To Kill a Chi Chi with its guitar sound and particular sense of melody. On the other hand, you've also got tracks that sound like a rougher take on what you'd find from an actual Mars Volta album, particularly with the Bedlam-esque groove featured on Crow's Feet, or the really strange sound of Saturine, with its out of tune, barely coherent guitar lines being both playful and weirdly catchy despite it all.

My favourite part of the album is definitely the one-two punch of Pineapple Face and Not Even Toad Loves You however. The way these two meld into one another, being kicked off with such an unhinged, chaotic vocal performance before paving the way for something that maintains a lot of the same instrumentation while being far more subdued, especially with that chorus, is just a great way of opening things. This is especially the case with the last couple of minutes of Not Even Toad Loves You bringing back a lot of that intensity to bring things full circle, which is something that happens a couple of times throughout to further add this sense of cohesion. Overall an album that both manages to be incredibly raw while still maintaining a certain sense of listenability that makes a bunch of these songs insanely memorable despite how off-kilter it is, and one that I definitely feel I could recommend to newcomers of Omar's discography as a way to introduce them to a few different styles of his while also having some seriously great song quality to back it all up.