Review Summary: Omar's "Electro-Pop" album.
Omar had previously ventured in Electronic music in a previous album,
"Minor Cuts and Scrapes in the Bushes Ahead". For the most part, the album was instrumental and felt more like an experiment than a conscious effort. It was an exploration of the electronic genre with no particular purpose but to see what the end result might be.
Tychozorente is an expansion of that experiment but only this time with the addition of famed Mexican singer and girlfriend, Ximena Sariñana, providing vocals. Where it's predecessor music was composed under a free-form environment, Tychozorente follows a more traditional orchestration.
The album opens with,
"Los Siete Sermones A Los Muertos", and it immediately expresses both the mood and the agenda of this album. Its a very delicate piece of music decorated in the familiar layers of ambient psychedelia. This album is divided into two parts; the tracks that have vocal deliveries from Ximena and the ones that are narrated by Omar. There is a romantic atmosphere that is induced by the music that feature Ximena. They are often confessions of romantic experiences, describing both the blissful and devastating sides of romance. The instrumental elements of these pieces display a gentle composition of flourishing psychedelic sounds, feeling almost optimistic in nature.
The tracks that feature Omar project a different philosophy. The music exhibits a more gloomy tone, and his lyrical deliveries seem more like confessions of pessimism than romance. He does expresses a desire for love, but he uses obscure metaphors to describe his emotions that are almost unsettling to the imagination. This album could have been more enjoyable if it were to only feature Ximena's vocals on each track, without having Omar dwelling in ambiguous spoken verses in half of the album. But even still, its refreshing to see Omar expanding his horizons and experimenting with yet another new musical approach. I must comment on Ximena's versatility, as she enthusiastically ventures into whatever realm Omar takes her into. Whether it's Psychedelic Rock, acoustic ballads, or Electronica; she makes herself feel right at home, feeding off Omar's creativity and vice versa. Its tough to say how fans of Omar will view this album, as it diverts even further from his earlier efforts that consisted of more aggressive music. But there are some great moments within this particular effort, I recommend it to any fan who simply desires to listen to anything new from The Mars Volta guitarist.
