This album kicks off aiming to stun, and you can't help but let it: "As You Do" bursts in with some psychedelic short-circuit funk that sounds like Sly Stone taking over Manitoba's laptop-processed pop, pressing every button on the console to make sure you hear something that trips you up and out. Sliced-in guitar scratches blip all jerky behind Shannon Lee's gospel belting. And when that tack's exhausted its tweakability, a sunny west-coast pop blur sweeps in underneath and carries the rest of the way through. You'd have to be awfully jaded not to drop your jaw, however metaphorically, during that first wow-inducing rush. HELLO, it says: this is the first time Brad Laner has dragged out and dusted off the Medicine name in around eight years, and he's clearly hoping to make an occasion of it.
Not that the sound is a complete surprise-- if anything, it feels like the obvious culmination of the noises Laner's spent his long career making. (He's one of those Los Angeles music-biz lifers; his drumming brother even makes him a family lifer, like the Waronkers or the Hadens; he was in Savage Republic when I still had a flat-top; you will never stop this guy making records.) Medicine itself started off as a full band, and one of America's more interesting shoegazer troupes-- partly because Laner's guitar noise had more to do with ear-bleeding buzz than the tripped-out swooning of My Bloody Valentine, and partly because he was one of few to take note of MBV's tentative attraction to tech beats. But Medicine-- after collaborating with both Cocteau Twins and contributing a popular track to The Crow's soundtrack that painted them as gothy dreamers-- fizzled and stalled and shortly split.
Since then, Laner's released a record nearly every year as The Electric Company, gravitating toward samplers and computers and a dozen breeds of guitar drone, electronica, Krautrock homage, and IDM tweakery. While this may have struck Medicine's rock fans as some sort of static purgatory, Laner's currently rising star says otherwise: he eventually linked up with Kid606's attention-grabbing Tigerbeat6 label (the Kid programs some drums here), lending him a visibility one imagines helped buoy him back up to the point of reviving Medicine. That, and\x97even though Laner sings quite a bit here\x97the re-addition of a female vocalist: Shannon Lee, daughter of Bruce, which brings the whole Crow thing full circle.
That's the back-story. The Mechanical Forces of Love, as it turns out, is less a synergy of old-Medicine and Laner's Electric Company excursions and more just a fine-tuned pile-up of them. Both impulses are there, constantly jostling for space, and it's the unpredictable victories of each that make the record a surprising listen: just when you've locked onto a guitar-noise groove, the bottom drops out, revealing a pit of queasily acidic squelches; just when you think you've figured out which recognizable blend of pop and technology Laner's working with, the whole thing turns disorientingly on its head and leaves you hanging. There are times when this makes the record impressive and times when it seems like Laner's too interested in pulling out the rug to ever get the furniture set up.
This makes for some gorgeous movements, whose occasionally fleeting appearances in the sifted jumble are half the fun. \x93Best Future\x94 spangles out acoustic guitars and arranges soaring choral harmonies like the airy and crystalline earnestness of His Name Is Alive; \x93I M Yrs\x94 kicks off with a dubby tech groove that's both sort of shocking and just chewily perfect. \x93Astral Gravy,\x94 which follows, is the big resurrection of old-Medicine circa The Buried Life, when Laner realized how great it sounds to filter rootsy guitar-boogie through the dream-pop sound. And above and beyond all of those solid moments, there are countless gorgeous half-minute stretches of meandering dub turns, of psychedelic crescendos, of enveloping atmospheres and out-of-nowhere guitar groans: tech-assisted as it may be, this is a psychedelic record at heart, and those are the bits that count.
But even before the rush of the sonics wears off, the flip-side of that is obvious: the flip-side has, in fact, been obvious since Medicine's 1992 debut. Then, as now, there are the odd Medicine tracks that feel disturbingly empty, and not in the good way: the trebly drone or languid low end might be right to get lost in, but they meander less than thrillingly, as if Laner's response to a lack of concrete ideas is to disorient you and then croon druggily as if there's something there. Sometimes there isn't: it's a curious quality, particular to Medicine records, of extended murk with no way inside.
With The Mechanical Forces of Love, that's a small caveat: whatever falls through the sieve is worth shrugging off in favor of the nuggets that stay inside. It's a striking return for Laner-as-Medicine\x97a psychedelic record with a robot inside, seriously woozy and surprisingly soul-touched trippiness of the lights-out, headphones-on, I-am-sinking-into-a-bottomless-fog variety. For some it might burn off quickly, but for just as many it'll sit just fine.
