This is an incredible album that has locked down an admirably-wide lane for me - slow Spanish guitar, the most sedate vocals possible from Ximena Sariñana, and no discernible cultural impact whatsoever. Omar Rodríguez-López was a big deal as a part of At the Drive-In and The Mars Volta, but a huge part of his legend was the staggering amount of material that he released in every conceivable style (and, to a lesser extent, the wildly varying quality of those releases), and it's exactly this sort of curio that keeps people combing through his discography. There's no indication that El Trio will ever reunite, and the only music that does remotely the same thing for me was made by a guy who's dead now.

The scarcity of alternatives is certainly a big part of the deal for me, but this thing lies at the intersection of several big interests; Spanish is a beautiful language even before it's sung, but even still the album draws its exoticism not from its foreign origins but instead from otherworldly relaxation. It's something that could only exist as a one-off, leaving no room to be improved upon nor any facet for further exploration without risking redundancy. Nothing outside of it is like it; nothing within it is like anything else.

Highlights: Lunes, Jueves, Sábado