[Review] Big Sir - Digital Gardens

    Out of all the side projects The Mars Volta has spawned through the years Big Sir is probably the quietest, but "Digital Gardens", a remixing/reimagining of "Before Gardens, After Gardens", the band's last studio album released in 2012, seeks to knock fans off their feet with an electronic punk take on their latest work.
    Besides playing bass for The Mars Volta, Juan Alderete is known for his legacy as the bass player of heavy metal band Racer X so I wasn't very surprised about the idea of this record, but hearing Lisa scream caught me completely off guard when I first listened to it. The album consists of 9 tracks ranging from remixes to completely re-recorded versions, featuring Dave Elitch of Killer Be Killed and ANTEMASQUE on several tracks and Bosnian Rainbows' and ex-The Mars Volta Deantoni Parks on the closer. The "live in studio" songs are basically punk rock versions and are very entertaining, but the remixed versions are more interesting, the electronic aspect of their music is much more prominent and Juan's bass tone is dirty and loud, combined with Lisa's rough vocals and distorted drum beats.

    Most of the songs on the album clock at 2 minutes so I barely got to enjoy them before they ended, but it works for the album and it's punk attitude. "Digital Gardens" is definitely not something to listen to over and over but a good snack in between albums, a few punches and kicks and it's over and despite it's lenght it has some high moments, "Old Blood" sounds like a punkish Bosnian Rainbows, "Right Action" features impeccable drumming from Dave Elitch and "The Kindest Hour" is suprisingly calm and dreamy compared to the rest of the record.
    "Digital Gardens" is an entertaining sonic experiment that won't quench your thirst for a new Big Sir album, but it's definitely worth a listen, it's a short but solid record that doesn't have any dull moments.

Ranking: good

Accesibility: average

For fans of: punk, garage, electronic music

Link: http://bigsir.bandcamp.com/album/digital-gardens-2

[Review] Bosnian Rainbows - Bosnian Rainbows

Most of us know Omar Rodriguez-López for the super-prolific multi-intrumentalist madman he has become in the years after At The Drive In's break up, never really focusing in just one project at the time. Having released an album and formed a "temporary" band with every musician he has come in contact with so far, no one expected Bosnian Rainbows would become his main project in so little time.

Many fans anticipated The Mars Volta's breakup since the release of their 2009 album Octahedron, but a few hiatuses later TMV was still going, and with the incorporation of Deantoni Parks on drums, Omar and Cathy Pellow (head of Sargent House and Omar's partner in his own label) heralded the arrival of a new TMV.

At the same time, Omar adopted Teri Gender Bender's band Le Butcherettes into his own label, so it was a matter of time before both had an album of sorts. It wasn't a surprise when it was announced that the newest incarnation of Omar Rodriguez Lopez Group would feature Teri Gender Bender, but the group soon had it's own name and after a few months of silence it was announced that The Mars Volta was no more.

Naturally there's has been a lot of hype about the two bands risen from the ashes of TMV (Cedric Bixler Zavala went on to form Zavalaz with Juan Alderete and a few friends), so now that the album has dropped there's no doubt Bosnian Rainbows is anything but "a new TMV", but some elements still remain.

Their self titled debut is somewhere between Noctourniquet and Omar's experiments with electronic music in albums like Tychozorente (2010) and Saber, Querer, Osar y Callar (2012). The bass has been replaced by synths, Teri Gender Bender lays down some dark, more conventional (and often punk infused) vocals instead of Cedric's anguished wails, Deantoni plays a stripped down kit while also playing keys and Omar, surprisingly, rarely stands out over his bandmates. Every instrument has the same level of protagonism, Omar's guitar playing has become subtler in the last year to the point where he's just another part of their aural spectrum.

This new equilibrium isn't all for the good though. While the album starts with a few really solid songs, it soons begins to feel a little too flat, there's few suprises after the first three or four songs, and while there's a nice variety of tunes here it feels like Bosnian Rainbows is missing an element that raises the band above their self imposed limitations. This why I feel the strongest tracks on the record are opener "Eli", which slowly builds up into it's great chorus and "Worthless", featuring an infectious drum beat by Parks, a great "solo" by Omar and again a great outro by Deantoni in the closing seconds, along with a solid performanced my Teri Gender Bender through and through.

Bosnian Rainbows could become so much more if they let themselves shine some more individually, but for now it feels like a band whose sound still doesn't feel greater than the sum of it's parts.

7.5/10

(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.