The 1990s revival has seen a lot of odd reunions, but L.A. noise-pop band Medicine’s return after its split 18 years ago still stands out. The group, best known for its inclusion on The Crow soundtrack in 1994, didn’t leave behind a sizeable fan base, and while there’s been recent resurgence of interest in the decade’s shoegaze scene, to which the band was tangentially involved, they’re not exactly a household name.
If it’s a highly unexpected reconciliation, it’s also well timed. The combination of shoegaze’s aggressive guitar turbulence and dream pop’s phantasmagoric hookiness that they perfected on 1993’s The Buried Life sounded out of place at the time, but their new To the Happy Few, made with the same exact formula, now sounds perfectly situated at the leading edge of rock tastes.
The group’s sonic mastermind Brad Laner has spent much of the intervening years in the studio as a producer, engineer, and multi-instrumentalist on recordings by Brian Eno, Caribou, µ-Ziq, and the Faint, among others, and he seems to have not only kept up with new technology and changing tastes, but to develop a whole range of new talents and techniques. (He also spent a little time in the early aughts attempting to relaunch Medicine as a more electronic-oriented project with new collaborators, but that part’s easily skipped over.) To the Happy Few will very likely turn out to be one of the best sounding guitar-based albums of the year.
And it’s the raw sonics where Medicine’s real appeal lies. Vocalist Beth Thompson has a gorgeously ethereal voice, especially when it’s multitracked several layers deep and drenched in reverb and modulation effects, as it often is. But while her uncomplicated melodies perfectly suit the group’s intentions and offer listeners a crucial personal identity to latch onto, they don’t do any more heavy lifting than any other instrument.
In fact, it’s usually pushed back deep in the mix, well behind Laner’s guitar. He’s an enthusiastic pedal junkie and a connoisseur of feedback, and one of the primary draws Medicine albums offer is a chance to see all the inventive ways he’s come up with to abuse a guitar signal. To the Happy Few has guitars that sound like squealing power drills, guitars that sound like sheets of white noise, guitars that sound like stroboscopic synth tones, and guitars that sound like Neil Young’s amp being recorded by a broken microphone that doesn’t pick up half the frequencies it’s supposed to.
Laner’s electronic phase has carried over from Medicine’s last incarnation, and the bulk of the songs here show some sort of dance music influence. Interestingly, it’s usually not in the form of synthesized sounds, as is usually the case in these kinds of cases. Instead it shows up in how he treats the stacks of guitars he piles up on each song, sweeping their frequencies like a rave DJ, saturating them with enough choppy distortion to start evolving into a quasi-synth sound, switching from one sound to another with edits he doesn’t even try to polish into an organic-sounding transition. (Drummer Jim Goodall’s noticeably beat-ier playing underlines the influence.)
Their first time around, Medicine was an oddity: a band in L.A. drawing heavily from two quintessentially British sounds that hadn’t found any significant traction within 5,000 miles of their home base. If things had gone differently-- like not getting placed on The Crow soundtrack-- they could easily have ended up an obscurity known only to a few noise pop obsessives. (And as it is their emphasis on tone over melody will likely continue to limit their audience to listeners who are fine with records without memorable hooks.) But two decades later, musicians fusing arcane subgenres have become incredibly common, and everything else that Medicine was doing that was so strange-- putting their studio techniques up front, making their guitars sound like anything but guitars-- has also become the norm. Unlike the other reunited groups of their generation, Medicine doesn’t sound nostalgic at all, and in fact they sound more contemporary than the majority of young guitar bands playing right now. It’s just been a matter of waiting 20 years for the world to come around.
