Medicine "The Mechanical Forces Of Love"

I dunno, in retrospect, I might almost like it *more* than the other Medicine albums. I probably play it more often than the others. Though that could have more to do with my changing tastes in music than the quality of the other albums. I recognise that it is two different bands that made the first 3 Medicine albums, and then this one. It's just more like the final one is more where I'm at now, musically, than the others.

wowee zowee, who knew that shoegazing paid so well? did Brad Laner marry into money?...trust fund?...The story says his mom's name is Koenig...there must be some connection to the famed Case Study House architect Pierre Koenig...I am loving his digs!...wasn't there a rendering of such a house on one of his LP covers?

Holy shit I love Medicine!

That's what Jason Pierce said...

Oh wait.

Brada Laner appears to have a solo record coming out, had a listen to one track and it sounds pretty great.

http://home-tapes.com/Hometapes/HAUS_HT031.html

Brada, duh!

This is relevant to my interests...

Got the CD from HomeTapes yesterday, sounds great on first listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x2rnXCU6xs

Ah, it's on Spotify, as well. Cool. Because I'm interested to hear which way it goes. If it's the more electronic cut-up psych end, then I'll bite, but if it's just 60s tinged Beatley psych, I really don't need any more of that in my life.

shot forth self living is an incredibly difficult listen but so rewarding. a medicine thread should be started other than this one. aruca is a beast of a song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96qQ6y_QpIc

<3 aruca, so so great

This is the only Medicine thread? Ridiculous! :-)

In any case, re-issues of the awesome SFSL and similarly awesome Buried Life here :

http://capturedtracks.com/shoegaze-archives/medicine/

...and lookee... Always Starting To Stop is here :

http://bradlaner.bandcamp.com/album/always-starting-to-stop

Thanks, Brad!

You didn't get the box? It's got everything you need!

wow I never saw this! Is the remaster job worth it?

I actually didn't open mine yet... I'll let you know!

Medicine kicks ass. I can't believe this is the only Medicine thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73_bmAZ7B-w&feature=related

tell me that song doesn't kick ass in a way that MBV never could

Indeed, it does, with a dollop of Beach Boys thrown in for good measure.

I picked up the expanded reissues of the first two albums on Record Store Day. The remastering is pretty good, but it's the extra tracks that make the thing.

I saw them around the time of The Buried Life, and it was a good but strange show. The drummer had some weird dynamic going with somebody in the audience, the music got really slowed down and hypnotic, the drummer and the singer appeared to be goading the crowd into some kind of response, and the girl I took kept having to go into the next room because the music was so loud. (Great place to take a first date, eh?)

I half-skimmed this thread on the bus yesterday and got my hopes completely up by misreading / misunderstanding and thought there was a NEW new Medicine album, as opposed to reissues and the live tape. Man, don't get my hopes up like that.

But it least it got me to dig out the other albums, and blog about them for music diary week 2012.

They do just seem like one of those bands that kind of fell between the cracks, but I also kinda like that they were this undiscovered secret between obsessives.

So...I wrote this:

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16507-shot-forth-self-living-the-buried-life/

Well.

I'm glad that you challenged your own preconceptions. And I'm glad that you admitted your own prejudices in the course of the article.

But I just really, really wish that Medicine had been better served. Like, I guess if the option is "guy who admits he hates them" vs "no one writes an article at all" the former is the latter of two evils.

Maybe it's that "a prophet is never appreciated in their own land" thing. (I mean, I have a friend who grew up in London who, to this day, thinks of Spacemen 3 as "that awful band who always used to play with My Bloody Valentine.") I also suspect that an American Anglophile is never going to like an American band who plays within a "British" genre.

I guess it's good for me to finally have some answers of why you've hated them for so long, but I can't help, as a completely obsessive fan, feeling a bit butthurt.

sort of agree. given that pitchfork reviews appear not as individual assessments but as the site's verdict and that the site is such a prominent arbiter of taste, it's a bit disappointing that they gave these to someone who at best was going to find out that "hey, they don't suck half as bad as i thought."

on the strength of ilm love i have over the years picked up 2 medicine albums.
the debut album that ned reviews, and mechanical forces.
everytime this thread gets revived i've tried each album again.
but i struggle.
something just does not click for me, yet all the necessary ingredients for love from yours truly are all there.
maybe one day the penny will drop (knowing my head, it could even happen tomorrow)
i wonder headphone listening would open the album up more for me ..

I don't know guys, as I pointed out on Twitter, I could certainly do with MORE Pitchfork reviews that felt as personal and as honest as those did. Pitchfork has enough other sections of their site to be tastemakers, that I enjoy detours like Ned's. Of course this can lead to the slippery slope where the reviewer spends more time talking about what he drank the night he saw the band in question play, but I also think Pitchfork has enough really solid writers to indulge in this sort of thing more often. Granted, I'm not as personally invested in Medicine, so I saw them as a great read instead of something to get butthurt by.

I'm not the only one I know who found Medicine to be a lot more interesting than most of the other bands named as preferable in Ned's review. This wasn't a band that came from shoegaze dreaminess and then slowly stirred increasing amounts of noise into arrangements of lovely songs; this was a band that started from a love of industrial noise and then grafted the pop on top of it. And it was a graft; saying that it doesn't 'gel' is kind of missing the point. Spending time comparing them unfavorably to Blur or Curve instead of mentioning this as more of a meeting of Merzbow or Whitehouse and the Beach Boys with occasional guest appearances from the actual Elizabeth Fraser (and not mentioning her collaboration with them on their biggest hit seemed like an omission that would have helped potential fans quickly understand where this band was coming from; or mentioning Laner's time in Savage Republic, or etc etc). I get that the appeal of Pitchfork is the emotional space to have these gut-level responses, but at the same time it's truly a shame that this is going to be their most widely read american review

& just to clarify by my use of the word 'graft': it wouldn't have worked if they hadn't grafted some pretty awesome songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib6THw-d0c8

last minute of that song is not fucking around; Medicine did not use noise as an ornament

yes! That is exactly what I liked about them. Like, they were coming from the same tradition as the first two Mercury Rev albums - of this huge abrasive nasty racket, that just happened to have this obsession with Prince and Madonna drizzled over the top, like a spoonful of sugarpop makes the... heh ... Medicine go down. It was a collision of seemingly irreconcilable influences that somehow managed to gel and really work.

I did my retrospective of them towards the end of Plan B magazine, and my reference was Amon Duul mashed with Madonna. It wasn't just "let's scuff up the edges with some distorted haze" it was "let's somehow hammer a pop song out of this squealing feedback from a short circuited ham radio."

Aruca shows how they did it, like there was just this wall of utterly free-form noise that they treated like a sculpture and slowly chiselled a fantastic pop song out of it in a way that you saw every hammer stroke as a block of granite turned to a human-shaped form to a Greek statue, and yet still couldn't quite believe that it was in there all along, and yet the chaos still threatens to swamp the pop song at any moment.

Also, do the remasters manage to capture how FUCKEN LOUD they were? Like, you couldn't put their CDs in random with other artists because they were just mastered about twice as loud as anyone else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdAloztRU4E

^^^any other band would have cut the intro and just used the popsong at the end. But that long intro is what makes the pop song make sense.

Too bad one of you two couldn't have done the review. Thanks for the kinder form of analysis !

ooooh.

i'm so going to have to dig the albums out and give them more time aren't i.

I adored Medicine at the time, and the first two albums still sound great today, and loud too. "One more" is one of my favourite album openers ever, those first few minutes are amazing. The reissues look fab, the thought of a version of "Time baby" recorded with Van Dyke Parks make my mouth water.

I was intrigued enough to get Mechanical Forces of Love by K's effusive praise at the time, but I didn't get it; think I was coming at it from a Manitoba-direction.

I did see an article about Brad's house though, which was lush. I would like his decor.

Yes, Brad's house is f*cking delicious - http://www.latimes.com/la-hm-musicianhouse-laner-pictures,0,4423459.photogallery

I could certainly do with MORE Pitchfork reviews that felt as personal and as honest as those did. Pitchfork has enough other sections of their site to be tastemakers, that I enjoy detours like Ned's. Of course this can lead to the slippery slope where the reviewer spends more time talking about what he drank the night he saw the band in question play, but I also think Pitchfork has enough really solid writers to indulge in this sort of thing more often.

^^

What exactly was personal about Ned's review other than bragging how his having been a 1st generation Shoegaze snob prevented him from enjoying Medicine ? Ned was holding that dump in for 20 years. Hope he feels better now.

also he did 9/11

I knew it !

I fully acknowledge that a private review website has no obligation to be "fair", but it just doesn't seem quite right that someone who actively dislikes a band should review that band's work. The first two Medicine albums are fantastic, and I think they deserved an unbiased ear.

Even if Medicine isn't a first generation shoegaze band, it's still better than 85% of shoegaze-- just like how Dukes of Stratosphear are better than most of the psychedelic rock style they borrow from. Obviously, you can argue about time and place, and whether an album can truly be a classic if it came out too late, or is from the wrong part of the world, etc. It just seems kinda shitty that mediocre horseshit like Chapterhouse and Pale Saints still gets remembered when a great band like Medicine gets forgotten.

(a) the fuck is an "unbiased ear"
(b) Captured Tracks rereleasing Medicine's back catalogue is way more complimentary and useful than anything that's been doled out to either of those two bands in the last decade (that I'm aware of)

(a) the fuck is an "unbiased ear"

i'd answer this semi-coherent half-question by gently suggesting that an "unbiased" ear involves a listener who hasn't already come to some kind of strong conclusion about what they're about to listen to.

Hey Brad-- how do you pronounce 5ive?

sorry for my semi-coherent half-question Poliopolice

a review that says "check it out I thought this band sucked back in the day but listening again it is actually p cool in parts, 7/10" seems perfectly objective by the normal standards of record reviewing

I'm sure if this review had been given to someone who approached it 100% fresh and ended up bagging on it, you would have been cool w/ that thanks to their unbiased ear

ha, the biased reviewer is the literary equivalent of the proverbial activist judge

Ned Raggett = Antonin Scalia

he also a personal friend of many ILM folks.

just saying like.

as is Antonin Scalia!

anyway, are you suggesting that we aren't allowed to review the reviewer because people here know him personally? he's writing for a major publication, he's fair game. anyway, it's more of a commentary on the process than of Ned specifically.

i know not of AS.

hidden pseudos mean little to me.

i thought the review was pretty straight down the line.

provided context as to his previous experience with medicine, and then gave a current viewpoint as to the reissues.

i really dont see a problem.

all the more so given that he has expressed his love for brads non-medicine material i.e. he is anything but a hardcore hater with an ax(e) to grind.