Review Summary: Brace yourself: 'My Life' by onion growth is a twisted, genre-bending experimental sonic trip that will either blow your mind or make you question your sanity
When asked what the most exciting activity under the moon is, one might say vegetables, mental disabilities, and spinning Bob Dylan. There is no shame in that, as it is better to accept kinks rather than to fight them – and onion growth is the peanut to my jelly in that meaning. I mean the “musical project”, not the farming, but I ain’t sure what is more interesting.
“My Life” has very little in common with music and life though. Don’t let the mischievous opening track, Midnight Robot, fool you with its humorous approach and goofy singing about cream cheese. What starts as a weirder and more strung-out homage to David Bowie and Thin Lizzy, quickly becomes a full-blown cluster*** worthy of the worst Lightning Bolt eras and borderline unlistenable noise bombardment.
Swinging from the naive lo-fi ballad moaning to Brian Chippendale’s drumming, and onion growth then casually explores acoustic rock, breakbeats, and extreme psychofolk – and by extreme I mean extreme, the type that sends your buddy to the cursed Yuggoth dimension on your acid trip.
I should mention the amount of ***s given during the record of this monstrous opus: absolute zero. Everything becomes the weapon of sonic punishment, from kid's keyboards with prerecorded melodies to hardcore vocal processors. And the degree of madness achieved is such to match This Heat with all those reversed voice tapes, loops, and sounds of scat (and vomit).
Jokes aside, onion growth scares me with how deeply unsettling the album turned out to be. If you peel under the first layers of amateur bedroom gibberish for fellow stoner friends, you’ll find a clandestine of hardcore psychonaut adventures.
