***Chicago's Axis: Sova hit the beaches of southern California with Ty Segall to make a total hi-fi classic. Often feral and consistently catchy, Blinded By Oblivion is lit up with interlocking drum kit + drum machine, adventuresome guitar, bass, and harmonic vocals on every song. Icy lyrical perspectives, rendered in a sunshiny natural paradise, transmit the fun and fraud of human polarities with urgency and an occasional eye roll. PLAY LOUD.
LP $24.25
10/06/2023
MC $12.75
10/06/2023
***Shampoo You is the third AXIS: SOVA album, following 2015’s Early Surf and 2016’s Motor Earth. With each succession, the Axis sound-shape we recall in our mind’s ear morphs in subtle yet definitive ways, allowing Axis: Sova to take its intended form before us, as different essences coming into clearer view in every listen. Now, with Shampoo You, the impact is unprecedentedly direct and connective, the amusement of rock-making turned thrillingly alive, in the present! The sharpened peaks of the landscape on the Shampoo You trip provide fresh pleasures for the listener—as we get into their neck-throttling dysmorphia anthems, we become glammy and physical, moving and transcending beyond our fallible body. Reality becomes a crystalline game to be mastered, as our mind vanishes beyond the fog that’s plagued our existence, the eternal night flashing blindingly into bright day. (STREET DATE - 11/16/2018)
LP $19.50
11/16/2018
MC $10.50
11/16/2018
***Just a little more than a year since last transmission and suddenly the rotation to Motor Earth signals a new day in the life and anti-life of AXIS: SOVA! We expect our music to reinforce perceptions of time as an arrow bolting forward, one way, into the future. But where’s the symmetry in that? Everything else in physics is two-way traffic; that’s the Faustian Universe that Axis: Sova scans for its rock. Where past, present and future are all pulling together, known together—as if we could get a clean link to that other hemisphere in our brain. We’re at the edge of the edge, how much further to the fringe? The fuzzing, burning film stock of Early Surf was like a solarized sound of discontent and not-belonging, a state of dissonance within a state of reverberating vocals, circulatory systems of guitar and test-tube rock beats. The mix was TWEAKED, slaved over in an endless night. Motor Earth trips that trend further, rife with percolating boogie, suicidal punk shredders and cavernous rock, but this time, it’s a planet cleared of sonic brush so as to cleanly reflect the star it orbits and the moon it mirrors. (STREET DATE - 10/14/2016)
LP $19.50
10/14/2016
MC $10.50
10/14/2016
***In the beginning was the guitar, electric. Like the monoliths of old, standing tall at crucial, evol points in our “civilization.” In those days before the Axis, SOVA was a youngster. He moved to the music. He set the clock to the rock. The axe was an instrument wielded by heroes, and looking at them, he could imagine his hands on their necks. He knew he was capable of handling them. He anticipated getting into jams with them, and getting out. Some years down the line, Early Surf s the second full-length trip into the AXIS—a journey that’s landed on a couple 7”s and, most recently, a gnarly cassette along the way—but SOVA’s been playing and recording for awhile now; thus, the issue of getting sounds from within his head all the way out of there and into the mix is less a battle and more a way of life. To go ALL THE WAY at any given phase, AXIS: SOVA was brought home, and to a variety of locales, where recording and re-recording and mixing and remixing could potentially reach the infinite. It’s there he got really down into it, collaging riffs and inspirations, scraping and scrapping the blown-out waves from his amps to make SONGS. Tweaking the minutia with headphones, AXIS: SOVA fought and fucked the cassette tape limits in order to get a slice of weirdo bedroom vibe-cake, with a mega-bent guitar focus, to make Early Surf. (STREET DATE - 2/17/2015)
LP $19.50
02/17/2015
***Two-shot blast from this dazzling low-culture, high-impact unit from Chicago. Past the Edge smacks ya around with Martin Rev’s suicidal pulse and the type of twisted fretboard abuse that warrants enough respect to keep us from mocking Helios Creed’s cowboy hat to his face. Grading on a Curve is the soundtrack to an uninvited chemically-induced journey. A bad one.
7" $6.00
07/09/2013