- Lexx was last seen re-editing Black Sabbath's ‘Symptoms of the Universe’ into an unplugged and tie-dyed Latin groove. ‘Symptom of the Sea’ was a mindless boogie, but one that never shied away from a little riffage to go along with the track's loud ocean splashes. For his debut on Permanent Vacation, Lexx makes sure to keep the same casual atmosphere, making ‘Axis Shift’ laid back to the point of sounding lazy. Which is a pretty disarming trick. It lets Lexx use all the trappings of a sunburned Balearic spirit—flinging arpeggios, chicken-scratch guitar and sighing analogue synths—without sounding precious for a second.
But it's a trick that makes you wonder how much longer this beardo/cosmic/neo-disco bubble can grow before it bursts. Especially with ‘El Sueno Lucido,’ where Lexx lets loose his lite-rock guitar strum and ends up sounding ponderous and lost. If the whole Beardo enterprise has maintained a factory of turning kitsch into gold, it's done so by injecting songs with a sense of weight or expanse, a fact doubly missed in ‘El Sueno Lucido.’ In fact, all it takes is the glide of the ‘Axis Shift,’ with the arpeggiated delay tickling a slowed Italo bassline, to make you realize how easy it must be to make this music sound so good.
Lista de títulosA Axis Shift
B El Sueño Lúcido