Axis: Sova - Blinded By Oblivion (2023) [Hi-Res]

Blinded By Oblivion is a perfectly conceived album of head-catching tunes in proliferation, produced for rock n’ roll radio. The elements are there: compassion for our collective fallibility, rebuke on the tip of the tongue, all rolled tight with hook-laden, high-energy construction. Each song takes a slew of heady musical inputs to inform a harrowing and insistent lyric POV lit up by allegories of social estrangement and personality crisis.

Brett Sova plays guitar and sings, Jeremy Freeze plays bass and sings, and Josh Johannpeter plays drums. Josh and Brett split drum programming duties. This is the newest iteration of a longstanding musical idea, one that was formed by Brett as a solo bedroom-guitar-noise-with-drum-machine endeavor over a decade ago and has mutated all the way to the present group. Often ferocious and consistently catchy, Blinded By Oblivon features drum kit and drum machines interlocking on every song, where adventuresome guitar, bass, and vocal harmonics light it up wildly across many points on the rock spectrum. Sova’s traditionally icy lyrical perspectives, this time rendered in a sunshiny natural paradise, transmit the fun and fraud of human polarities with urgency, and an occasional eye-roll.

Working in their vacuous, windowless basement studio, beneath the Soccer Club Club gallery in Chicago, Axis: Sova wrote the material for Blinded By Oblivion slowly, in shifts. In 2020, as the world went remote (and following the departure of guitarist Tim Kaiser), Brett Sova and Jeremy Freeze spent their time fleshing out ideas with a new drum machine, sometimes recording spontaneous jams with a freshly acquired tape machine. Some of those came out on the Fractal EP, while more became the basis for songs that would become Blinded By Oblivion. “We were approaching new songs like experiments, and were planning to record with much spontaneity and overdubs,” Sova says. Towards the end of 2021, however, as the blueprint for an album was apparent, they realized they had an opportunity on their hands: “I’d also longed for greater rhythmic flexibility with our music, so we took a leap and invited our friend Josh (Johannpeter) to play drums with us. After just a few months of playing together, we were clicking so hard I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so musically free.”

Even before the percussive addition, they’d already laid plans to record at Harmonizer Studios, in Topanga, CA, with Ty Segall producing. While he session was delayed several months, the band used their time to make further revisions to their songs, editing things down to their essential points. Shifting from the previously explored realms of extended jamming, they leaned more deeply into their punk- even pop- influences, and explored vocal harmony to juxtapose the now massive percussive elements of the group. “In my head, I could hear an amalgam of Devo recording Wire’s Chairs Missing with Tony Visconti in Berlin in 1977,” Sova says, a task for which Ty was most suitable!

The band recorded and mixed everything in 9 deeply productive days, with producer Ty’s relentless energy keeping them on pace, something akin to an artist retreat thanks in part to their beautiful surroundings. Morning swims in the Pacific Ocean served to reset the body and mind each day, providing enough charge and clarity to dive straight into the studio for another 11 hours. Says Sova, “There is no doubt the songs took on some of that solar radiation and salty air as they were laid to tape - something unavailable to us had we recorded them in Chicago.” Indeed, the clash of industrial steel vs. indelible nature is sonically palpable, and much of the album hinges, and thrives, on tension.

’Bout halfway through Blinded By Oblivion, we hear Sova shout, “I think my heart is made of metal.” Yuuuup. But we’d argue there’s at least a ventricle or two made of post punk! And with vena cavae split between psych and southern boogie. And cardiac veins of glam, power pop, and punk. Sometimes the heart is simply filled with sweet melody — so man, the beats of this metallic muscle are insane! Don’t try this at home — just play it at home. And in public. Wherever! And LOUD.

Tracklist:
1.01 - Axis: Sova - People (4:06)
1.02 - Axis: Sova - Hardcore Maps (1:51)
1.03 - Axis: Sova - I'm A Ghost (3:09)
1.04 - Axis: Sova - Trend Sets (2:32)
1.05 - Axis: Sova - Plastic Pageant Show (2:35)
1.06 - Axis: Sova - Metallic Hearts (3:29)
1.07 - Axis: Sova - Join A Cult (5:07)
1.08 - Axis: Sova - Persuasion (4:26)
1.09 - Axis: Sova - Writing Blind (4:01)
1.10 - Axis: Sova - That Dream Again (5:53)