by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Chicago’s Ovef Ow have been making synth heavy art punk for the better part of the last ten years, pulling influences that seem to range from B-52s and Devo to The Raincoats and Sleater-Kinney. Agitations is met with upbeat party anthems, paired together to create a swarm of new wave jangle and rough but friendly post-punk. Synths peel, drip, and flail across guitars, bass, and drums, ringing out with surfy exuberance, the band’s entire mood shifting between sunburnt joy to a stumbling sense of bliss. With a tour coming up later this week (dates are below), the band return to announce Vs. The Worm, their first new release in four years, out August 25th via What's For Breakfast? Records and the band's own Oort Cloud Records.
“Fauxtography” is the record’s lead single, a song that captures the band’s hard driving pop sound, dissonant and immediate, locked in but loose, with bona fide hooks and charming squiggles. The song rides a propulsive guitar riff, rusty and overdriven, while the rest of the quartet use the space to get funky, bouncing between mechanical rhythms and the whirring organ sounds of their synths. There’s a great energy to the song, moving between nearly spoken verses and a shimmering chorus, awash in layered boogie all the same.
Speaking about the single, the band shared:
"'Fauxtography' is about the curated self-narrative on social media; the anxiety of searching for validation and self-worth from whatever we mean when we say 'engagement' today. It’s a fast, hard garage punk song that features bouncy Devo-like synths and triangles." - Marites Velasquez (bass/vocals)
“I had been listening to a lot of Stereolab and the main melody just kind of came to me (it doesn’t sound like Stereolab at all now, but I could hear a version where Lætitia Sadier sings it in a really beautiful way). The words are just like, a literal confrontation of social media and a culture of performance and arranging ourselves to create a certain perception.” - Sarah Braunstein (drums/vocals)
“I came up with the main guitar riff came up pretty quickly and [...] the artificial harmonics from the guitar and the triangle mimic ringtones. Also, the verse and chorus parallel each other — the main hook being very light-hearted, like taking pictures at a show, but then the second part comes in real dark and powerful, like the effects of taking photos that are more meaningful and more permanent.” - Nick Barnett (guitar)
In regards to the video, Velasquez added:
"We’re working with Pamela Maurer, a Chicago-based multimodal/multimedia artist who creates performative spaces, immersive environments, videos, and music. We’ve known Pamela for years through the music scene, playing shows together with her project Baby Money & The Down Payments, and we’re so excited to take our creative partnership to the next level! In the video, Ovef Ow members find themselves undergoing a series of transformations, from buttoned-up business types to space age cult leaders, ultimately freezing in time as a spectacle from another era. Much of the video was filmed in an environment designed by Pamela for an exhibit (‘Winter Dreams’) at A Very Serious Gallery (Chicago), where her spatial installations explore the surrealist nature of dreams."
Tour Dates:
3/31 - Milwaukee, WI @ X-Ray Arcade
4/01 - Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
4/07 - Cincinnati, OH @ Comet Bar
4/08 - Dayton, OH @ Blind Rage Records
4/09 - Indianapolis, IN @ State Street Pub
4/13 - Champaign, IL @ The Recreation Club
4/14 - Lawrence, KS @ Repetition Coffee
4/15 - St. Louis, MO @ CBGB