Ashlexi For Whatever Your Heart Desires cassette
Experimental noise tape from singer/songwriter OLEXI’s ongoing project of releasing an album a month in 2024. February’s Rock N’ Roll Paint Job was a standout release of DIY garage punk, so I was expecting more of the same. Way wrong. This is a collection of blown-out bass grooves, splintered drum machine beats, blackened vocals, and documentary (mostly about weed) vocal samples. It sounds like MAYHEM meets PRURIENT’s Bermuda Drain era meets a self-destructing mainframe computer. It’s not a bad listen if you’re okay with noisy electronics puking all over each other, and there is a sonic cohesion that indicates some care was put into the arrangement and sequence of these tracks. This is enough to freak out the norms, but it could be even harsher. Turn the gain all the way to ten and daisy-chain your Death Metal distortion pedals to speaker-shredding insanity next time. Harsh heads don’t mind. Still, I appreciate the experimentation and would listen to this again over a generic pop punk release. What’s coming next month, OLEXI?