Local Review: Lysergic Ashes – Crocodile Sweets

Lysergic Ashes
Crocodile Sweets

Self-Released
Street: 06.07
Lysergic Ashes = Jet Set Radio soundtrack + |||||||||||||||||||| x Dolphin Machine 

Titular track “Crocodile Sweets” opens this album with synths that feel like they’re playing in reverse, giving the uneasy sense that you’re falling backward. As voices “ooh” and pull you further down, light touches of percussion enter—a tambourine shake here, a drum brush there. Halfway through, the percussion gathers large, and the heft of each element sloshes against another like toys in bathwater. This is the sweet touch of Crocodile Sweets by Lysergic Ashes, an album as energetic as it is soothing.

You feel this energy right off the bat on the second track, “God On A Stick (Gimme Gimme),” which picks up from the soft “oohs” of “Crocodile Sweets” into a ready-to-eat soundscape brimming with distortion and percussion. It conjures an image of a bustling garden of bugs or as though you’re peering into a busybody microcosm. Davis Johnson sings the lyrics like a low hum, vibrating underneath the track: “Gimme gimme pain / Gimme fire / Gimme everything I desire.” Alongside the thrumming beat, the lyrics are confessional and infectiously rousing. 

Crocodile Sweets is nine tracks and nearly 43 minutes long—each track is around five minutes and pulls its weight, gently contouring the album’s shape. You’ll probably find a track that hits your personal sweet spot. For me, “Dumpster Fire” feels the most evocative of the album, wielding a drum and bass–energy alongside crooning, unintelligible synth voices. The percussive energy dips in the middle of the track and leaves the synth to lilt like plumes of bedding. Suddenly, the drums reenter, and the momentum builds itself back up as the voices return.

A sweetness certainly abides through Crocodile Sweets. The low-energy moments contrast the high-energy ones in a way that makes even brash collisions feel calming and kind. The last two tracks, “Porcupine Eggs” and “Des Pas Sur La Neige,” amplify the album’s unsettling nature the most while giving the subsequent anxiety no true foothold. Crocodile Sweets gives us a place to lie next to our disquiet, look it in the eye and fall asleep together. –Parker Scott Mortensen

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