✦✦✧✧ Be careful what you wish for: Seminar IX does indeed have less noise-filler and more musical content, but the songs here are not as solid as the ones on Seminar IX. It also feels less like OMG and more like, well, Mutoid Man or Cave-In, frankly. I can respect the band’s commitment to underdeveloped song ideas; it’s just not for me.

✦✦✧✧ Seemingly reusing the same template that they used for The Ape Of God, OMG released a pair of companion EPs last week. Seminar VIII (the first of the pair) is both surprisingly listenable and excruciatingly tedious, with winsome songs bookended unnecessarily by noise that doesn’t seem particularly connected to the music.

★★☆☆ Oh, here we go. Do yourself a favor and turn the volume way down for the first two unfuckinglistenable minutes of this half of OMG’s double album. Pandemonium holds dominion over this recording. What music is allowed to take root here is reminiscent of “NO,” but these moments exist only as a reprieve from a lurking cacophony.

★★★☆ The first half of this double album finds Old Man Gloom in an even more experimental mood than ever before. Sure, we still here the crushing noisescapes that we heard on the group’s previous album, “NO,” but these are shorter now, as are the more “conventional” songs. Speaking of which, the band seem to be caught between different identities.