Review Summary: If you think the review is hard to read you should listen to the album.
I don’t know who the hell Omar Rodriguez-Lopez thinks he is but he has to stop all this nonsense/tomfoolery with the releasing of 4 solo albums a year all of which equate to the same bullsh
it constantly that bullsh
it being a series of textured farts and guitar bloops and drum smashing and bass bitch-slapping and awful sound sampling and manipulation it’s almost as if Omar wishes to create bad music under a solo moniker so that people still love The Mars Volta but that’s bullsh
it Omar you are teasing all of us God (praise be His name) fu
cking damnit a
ss bitches cunt wipe Omar your new project “El Grupo Nuevo” was supposed to be a fu
cking turnaround and bridge the gap between your often pointless and self indulgent solo material and the GREATNESS that is The Mars Volta but instead what
Cryptomnesia ends up being is a bunch of that same awful conglomeration of prog/acid/jazz/bullsh
it/psychedelic/post-punk that he has been sh
itting out on repeat for the past 5 almost 6 years now (and you know that he hasn’t once looked at his fans with kindness in his eyes?) I mean come on this album seriously sounds like what would happen if you took
De-Loused in the Comatorium stripped it of any cohesiveness added lots of guitar and bass effects that made sh
it sounds like farts and stomach gurgles (what the fu
ck is that bass sound in “Noir” SERIOUSLY) and then put into a Nicer-Dicer and then thrown back together with random thought processes as is apparent in “Elderly Pair Beaten With Hammer” which features not just one annoying guitar solo but two the latter of which bleeds into “Warren Oates” a song which sounds like a rejected version of “Ouroboros” (no but seriously, it’s the best song on the album-check it out) strung out ON CRACK which somehow isn’t as ridiculous as the lyrics on the album which include gems such as “girl you ain’t better than the germs I spread” which despite being my facebook status for the next three months is arguably the most offensively bad lyric I have heard since “My only addiction has to do with the female species I eat 'em raw like sushi” (could Cedric actually be Girardo? must investigate further) but I should digress about the mere words of the album because the true power is in the music like in title track “Cryptomnesia” which kind of sounds like what an acid trip sounds like to someone who has never done acid ever with its smooth but somehow stuttered groove and the repeated use of drum beats which is a problem throughout the record although I suppose its forgivable as it is Zach Hill who probably has no idea what the fu
ck Omar is trying to do with this conceptually-designed mindfu
ck of an album but regardless he makes the songs drone on and when a 3-4 minute song seems longer than the 6 minute song before it something naughty is afoot and it isn’t the tasteless use of ‘bad words’ in the song titles I mean really “Paper Cunts” is that supposed to be witty or anti-witty or just silly (perhaps anti-silly?) regardless the album is pure homogeneous sh
itheap of stream-of-consciousness turgidity nonsense that strives to be different and to take you “somewhere else” but in the end really just ends up being hilariously bad and hilariously derivative of his past work and despite the frequent “so-weird-it’s-almost-cool” moments it still just plain sucks hardcore.
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, f
uck you.
