Olexi

Reviews

Olexi Voicemails cassette

Oh my god. When I first started listening to this, I couldn’t believe it was actually the LP I was reviewing, but here it is. This is bad. This just sounds awful, like it was recorded in somebody’s dingy apartment on a flip phone. The vocals are not sung, but spoken in this obnoxious deadpan voice. The voice of the “vocalist” is just bad, and the production is practically non-existent. There’s these really thin synth and drum machine sounds that made me really question if this was even a serious music project at all. He’s not even rhyming most of the time, and when he does, it makes me grit my teeth. On the song “Miss You,” it’s him talking as a mother who misses her son and wants him to come home. It just really drives me up a wall, because he talks in this wimpy, feminine voice while that awful synth music plays. Then when it gets to the “I miss you” part, he starts screaming like he’s getting his asshole waxed. It’s horrendous. It tries to critique punk rockers, and I would be able to get behind that, however I can’t help but notice that the music is atrociously bad. I can’t recommend this, not even to the most die-hard synth punk fans.

Olexi Rock N’ Roll Paint Job cassette

Fun, scrappy solo project from Buffalo, New York that runs through alt/rock and garage punk with wild creative abandon. OLEXI’s shouted/spoken vocals sound like a mix of URANIUM CLUB and BIG BLACK, dripping with world-weary cynicism and humor. There is a freewheeling spirit to these songs, with sarcastic lyrics touching on issues of both small importance (“This is a song in A / This is a song in A” in “A,” and “Fuck cops / Go Bills!” in the fist-pumping anthem “Buffalo Fight Song”) and large (the rejection of false allyship and tokenism in “I’m Not Your Queer”). This collection is not especially rooted down to any one punk subgenre, with some tracks, like the multi-textured “Four Letter Word,” sounding like peak ’90s above-ground SONIC YOUTH, while others like “I Remember” take cues from the intricate rhythms of the MINUTEMEN. Enjoyable listen with personality to spare. According to OLEXI’s Bandcamp page, there will be a release every month, and with this amount of ideas and energy, count me in.