(8/10) Omar Rodriguez Lopez - Saber, Querer, Osar y Callar

If there is any rule to Omar Rodriguez Lopez' recent solo career, that rule is each time an album comes out it means at least two will be out soon. Saber, Querer, Osar y Callar [SQOyC] is no exception, after the release of Un Corazón de Nadie it only took a little more than a month for another of Omar's experiments to see the light. Following the trend of the aforementioned album, Saber is another compact delivery of noise-electronic-drone rock, with the particularity of featuring fellow The Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks on live drums. From the get go the album is all about synths, distorted, echoing vocals and almost free-style shifting "electronic" beats. It almost feels as if Rodriguez Lopez had written and recorded all the songs and then tasked Parks with pasting drums on top, which is not necessarily a bad thing and in fact works great; since the songs have a much less defined structure than regular TMV songs Deantoni has more space to improvise and lay down ideas over Omar's fertile soundscapes. 

SQOyC opens with the noisy, eerie collection of synths of Home Lost, with Deantoni laying beat after beat over Omar's babbling-like vocals, diving directly into the second track (Habits) and then taking a short break in the relaxed Gentle Umbrellas (with a very interesting implementation of backward guitars), that only gets a little more energic towards the end. The following four tracks can either be perceived as hit-or-miss efforts depending on how much time you are willing to invest into them and how much you can tolerate Omar's love for experimentation (curiously Tentáculos is an alternate version of Agua Dulce De Pulpo from Un Escorpion Perfumado, though at this point it's harder to tell which one came first). Decided? takes a step aside of the electronic nature of the album to deliver a more guitar-driven experiment that will probably remind you of Omar's early solo work, with Angel Hair going ever farther from the rest of the songs, probably Omar's own take on a love song and one of the most interesting songs on the album once you listen to it a few times. Overall a very solid effort, specially for something that could be labelled as an experiment.