Love Axe

Longtime friend of the site Love Axe returns with a new album, one that sheds much of the skin of his past works in favor of a focus on folk and country. Scarred and sickened by by the poison in the social and political wells of the last decade, the album seeks to come to terms with themes that only seem to be replaying in brighter hues and louder tones this year. Written in the wake of the last go ‘round with this administration, the shadows that shade Hatfield’s songs not only feel relatable, but unshakable as we’re ground further into the grist mills of history. The past power pop and indie touches are stripped back for Optimism Paranoia Desperation Abolition, leaving the Ojai songwriter exposed, but confident in a bed of strums, steel, sighs, and the occasional slash of clarinet. Love Axe has often been marked by a buoyancy, a sense of humor in the face of frustrations, but as with so many of us these days, the smiles don’t come easy, and they certainly don’t provide the solace they once did.

There’s a heavier tone to OPDA, staring down the whirlpool without the life preserver of humor. Overt expressions of drowning on “Forlorn Depression” and the title track spar with more opaque allegories for internal upheaval elsewhere in the album. The strums saunter, and if anything serves as a bit of a salve to the record’s sighs, its David Feeny’s touches of steel; a brush with country’s sanguine stares that might have been picked up somewhere off the breezes from the Topatopa peaks. It’s not necessary to be completely caught in the cultural fog around the album to enjoy it’s weighted wonders. Paired with any light drizzle and two fingers of rye, Hatfield takes stock like Oldham, Molina, or Callahan before him and fans of those will find plenty to bite into here. The internal bleeding’s been coming to the surface these days, a hundred cuts across the cultural horizon, but Love Axe’s latest provides a pretty perfect soundtrack to counting the contusions.

Support the artist. Buy it HERE.