To a small but cultishly devoted audience, Brad Laner is famous for his work with the recently rejuvenated Los Angeles group Medicine, which was responsible for some of the only lasting American contributions to the mostly British-dominated 90s shoegaze movement. Fewer listeners still know that since then he’s proven himself to be one of the only guitar heroes of the time who has fully embraced and adapted to the new technologies and techniques of the modern digital era. The album Medicine released earlier this year, To the Happy Few, was the first Laner recording I’d heard since 1995’s Her Highness, and while it stayed true to the fundamental sheets-of-guitar-noise spirit of the band’s earlier stuff, Laner’s production work (he’s produced all of the band’s albums) seemed heavily influenced by contemporary electronic music, and helped make the album a happily surprising success.
Laner’s well-regarded as a guitarist, but while he’s technically virtuosic, what he plays tends to pale in comparison to what he does to the signal leaving the instrument’s pickups. During Medicine’s first run that was running it through chains of overblown distortion and delay effects. Since then he’s expanded into digitally manipulating the sound, chopping it up and glitching it out in ways that resonates with the twitchier edges of the dance music scene. Like Brian Eno, who he’s worked with in the past—and whose influence would be easy to pick up on anyhow—Laner combines an appreciation of rock’s formal outlines with a compulsion to fill them with the most whacked-out futurist noises he can make.
Considering the way that Medicine has always prioritized texture over melody, you might expect Laner’s solo material to push even further out than his primary project. However, Nearest Suns, like his previous two solo outings, draws its inspiration from the peak of rock’s baroque psych-pop days, with Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds looming large over most of its songs. On “Nearly Hospital High,” he recreates the way that some of Paul McCartney’s Sgt. Pepper’s-era material sounds like a swinging, big-band pop number just barely able to keep its head above a torrent of psychedelic flourishes. With its base of handclaps, hand drums, and acoustic guitar topped by multitracked vocal harmonies and backwards electric guitar licks, the album opener “Be Gone” feels like a campfire singalong with a cheerful hippie acid cult, but the computer-precise sequencing of the rhythmic elements and the squelching guitar distortion flickering between the speakers also adds an unexpected ravey element.
Stylistically, it’s well-trodden ground that Laner’s covering here. Sgt. Pepper’s and Pet Sounds have formed the bipartite god to several consecutive generations of psych-pop auteurs, and even the slightly transgressive tactic of contrasting their fairly well-mannered melodies and harmonies with intensely ugly distortion has been done pretty much to death. But Laner’s a decent songwriter, and even the compositions that don’t really work, like the Tropicalia excursion “Summer Rudder", are worth hearing just for their production, which in this case involves chipper analog synth sequences set against fractally fuzzed-out guitar leads.
Nearest Suns gets more interesting when it takes its attention away from psych-pop’s Big Two and some of the self-consciously retro flourishes that they entail. The best song on the record is also its simplest, composition-wise. “Equals Sky” has just one droning chord that shifts between acoustic guitar arpeggios, Laner’s vocal harmonies, and heavily modified electronic noises that at times resemble a tape delay on the fritz. Behind the spare melodic elements there’s a weird rhythmic part consisting of some kind of John Cage-like prepared drum fed into a sampler and chopped up into an unstable loop that constantly seems ready to collapse. Without Laner’s production there isn’t much to the song, but the way he arranged and recorded it gives the track the feel of a musician and his gear in a tight symbiotic relationship, all falling apart together.
