UMBRELLA MISTRESS

Only so many times that ORL could do the whole "Omar goes pop" move before he misstepped with it I guess. Umbrella Mistress sees him leaning even further into psychedelia here than he did on Blind Worms Pious Swine, but it ends up sounding a whole lot more conventional than that one despite this. Rather than the bright, colourful and surreal nature of that album, where everything sounded vaguely uncanny, yet pretty nonetheless, this takes on a far more mellow, ethereal sound, with the way everything is so muffled and reverb-heavy being enough to sand down a ton of the rougher edges previous found even within projects like this. The issue to me lies in the fact that I don't really see this as an album with many original or interesting ideas going for it, it really is just mellow psychedelic pop, and while this leads to a couple of gorgeous tracks, namely Eastern Promises and Blue Pale Queen, I often find that there's just not quite a strong enough sense of melody to make a lot of the songs here rise above being a bit of a bore. If you reaaallly liked previous instances of Omar Rodriguez Lopez diving into more approachable, pop territory, then you might find something to enjoy here, but otherwise, I do think that there are quite a few other albums in this vein by him that I'd hand you first before even thinking of showing this one.