Omar Rodríguez-López
Amor de Frances
CLOUDS HILL
Despite giving his all within the post-rock en Español of The Mars Volta, De Facto, and At the Drive-In, Puerto Rico–born multi-instrumentalist Omar Rodríguez-López—since the time of 2004’s A Manual Dexterity : Soundtrack Volume One—has always had just a little bit more that he left behind. Some 50-plus solo albums more, in fact.
In collecting these solo and duo efforts into one (not really) cohesive whole, a multi-hued portrait of Rodríguez-López as an enigmatic genius, mutant collaborator, and freak-a-deaky obsessive emerges within the new Amor de Frances box set. Rather than see him solely as a future-forward deviser of flighty Latin traditionalism turned on its rocky, electronically tinged head (though there’s plenty of that to be found, too), the 57 albums in this set’s 60 vinyl LPs wind up as an insanely rich mine of tweaked-out jazz, golden blues, wonky prog, vertical cinematic soundscapes, Stravinsky-like classicism, straight-up pop, and beyond.
While his (separate) experimental duo recordings with Jeremy Michael Ward and John Frusciante borrow from Rodríguez-López’s spirited affection for garage psychedelia, late-aughts albums such as the tortured Despair, the shockingly melodic Solar Gambling, the beyond frenzied Cryptomnesia, and the holy Mantra Hiroshima exist as standouts within the manic entirety (and intensity) of Amor de Frances.
