Album Review: Blindshore

As a former axeslinger for long-gone ATX shoegazer greats Seven Percent Solution (authors of Gabriel's Waltz, one of the finest psychedelic rock records to ever gestate in the Lone Star State) and A Five and Dime Ship, guitarist James Adkisson knows his way around an effects pedal or two. For Into the Ocean, his third album under the Blindshore moniker, Adkisson takes forlorn, introspective pop songs and drowns them in a bathtub of reverb, fuzz, echo, and electronics, to rise again better than when they went under. Lead track "A Dark Path" drills down into a kind of probing melancholy but does it under the auspices of a spacey melody and an otherworldly shimmer. The propulsive "Submarine" grooves steadily through clouds of fuzzy atmosphere, with riffs floating out of the ether and insinuating themselves into your earhole before you know what's happened. The soaring "Star" blends distorted drum sounds with tuneful noises of enigmatic instrumental origin. "The Question" might get lost in its own plaintiveness if not for the noise guitar and hazy rhythms that rumble beneath its surface. Amazingly, all these machine-made accouterments serve the songs, rather than obscure them, making plain that, in Blindshore's world, sonic surgery reigns but solid songcraft rules.