Best Songs from Omar Rodriguez Lopez's Old Money

Definitely the highlight of the album, showing off the best guitar work on the album, with drumming only possibly rivalled by The Power Of Myth. The longer length of the song allows for much more progression and exploration as well, making full use of many effects. I especially love the echo effects used near the end of the song, and the more melodic approach this end has to it.

The strong groove that this song possesses immediately reminds me of The Bedlam In Goliath, just slowed down a bit. This also sounds quite a bit like The Mars Volta in terms of the extremely strong Spanish music influence that can be heard in sections, further accentuated by the sections that contain spoken word in Spanish. A pretty great song all around.

While the song goes off the rails at many points, the constant return to the triple cymbal hits and guitar strums every 4 bars gives the song an extremely cool effect. By constantly having this motif run throughout, no matter how loud and distorted everything becomes, it gives the listener something to latch onto, along with nicely dividing the improvisations in such a way that it feels more natural to have the song constantly change the way it does. Along with this, I really love the constant energy and pace that the song has.

This just sounds like an instrumental Mars Volta song, not that there's even a slight issue with that. The riffs and guitar playing in general are of really high quality, especially the riff, which sounds really great, even better than a large portion of Mars Volta material. The biggest star of the show however, is undoubtedly the drumming. It's fast and energetic, with some seriously impressive fills scattered throughout.

I like the world music percussion and synth strings used in this song. The song features some high quality soloing, and a much softer experience than the highly energetic or extremely strange nature of the rest of the album.

Cool, funky song with quite a lot of energy behind it. The spacey synth section in the middle is an nice diversion before the song really kicks into high gear, with some excellent guitar work that sounds really climactic and cool.

I love the wind instruments here, providing the main bulk of a really enjoyable groove. This song has an almost Krautrock element to it as well, essentially being a single, repetitive groove with some cool improvisation over the top of it. Not a bad song all around, with a good display of some instrumental freakouts that I find entertaining.

An interesting psychedelic experiment using a lot of feedback and distortion, with the heavily edited voices throughout being quite cool. Not much else of substance here, but an interesting experiment nonetheless.

Another filler interlude, somewhat better than 1921 on the basis that it is more eventful, but it's still fairly pointless