Ruminations on Medications

Hello, NAP, and thank you for having me yet again. On my first post as a provisional replacement for Roberto, I’m not going to attempt anything grandiose or topical; I’m just going to talk about a record that’s been on my mind lately:

Completely Removed, by Medications

I was introduced to this band by Wade Allen, the guitar player in Honey & Salt, which is one of the bands I’m playing with in Austin. The two main guys in Medications, both multi-instrumentalists, are named Chad Molter and Devin Ocampo. They’ve been playing together for a long time, and about ten years ago they were in a band called Faraquet. As I implied in my review of Completely Removed, I saw Faraquet when they opened for Fugazi in Atlanta in 1999.

This was one of those experiences where you realize only slowly that you’re impressed. I remember thinking that I couldn’t figure out how they were producing all those notes with only one guitarist, who from what I could see at the side of the stage, didn’t look like he was doing all that much. When I swung around to look, I could see that he was rapidly- very rapidly- picking out notes in the chords he was fingering. You can sort of see an example here, though it’s difficult to make out Ocampo’s hands from this distance.

(This is from a reunion concert in 2008. The interwebs seem to be devoid of footage from their first go-round.)

I thought this was pretty nuts at the time. I bought the only record they had, which was a split with Akarso, and I listened to it a LOT. I had never heard any punk rock with the density of notes that Ocampo was pulling off. In fact, I think this may have been the first math-rock record I ever owned (if you don’t count Sunny Day Real Estate or Midiron Blast Shaft, which you really shouldn’t). I used to play along to “Yo-Yo” on my drums, trying to figure out all the weird timing changes without actually working them out on paper beforehand, which went about as well as you can imagine, but was a fun challenge.

Naturally, when a full-length Faraquet release was announced in 2000, it was hotly anticipated (by me). And some other people too; I remember that when my friend Viki came back to Rice from Christmas vacation in DC, she complained (quite rightly, in my opinion) that some of her friends thought Faraquet superior even to Fugazi. BLASPHEMY. Anyway, when the record, The View From This Tower, came out, I was a little disappointed. Not enough rapid-fire arpeggiating or jazzy drum fills; too many horns, cellos, and other fixings. Ocampo played a rambling, slack drum solo at the end of a boring slow song. I kind of thought there was a lot of junk on the record.

In retrospect, one thing that prevented me from enjoying the record was J. Robbins’s production, in particular his smacky drum sounds, which don’t fit Molter’s drumming to begin with and don’t work well with the subtle, varied arrangements on the album. Another was that Faraquet was looking beyond first-wave math-rock to the more complex and experimental stuff that was coming in the next decade. I couldn’t appreciate that at the time- looking back, Tower was fairly forward-thinking in that way. Other people did appreciate it, and the record became sort of a cult hit. But Faraquet broke up the next year without even doing a proper tour, and personally, I more or less forgot about them.

Flash forward 9 years, and Wade tells me how great Medications are. Well, I did pick their first LP, Your Favorite People All In One Place, as one of the best math-rock records of the last decade. But, second-guessing myself again, I think that spot probably belongs to Faraquet instead. People has more of what I was originally looking for from a Faraquet LP, but as it turns out, that’s not as great as I thought it would be, and besides, after five years, other bands had caught up to (or rocketed past) Ocampo and Molter. People is not a pioneering record.

Also, I saw Medications during SXSW in 2009, and to be honest, I though they kind of sucked. Certainly it was nothing like the revelatory experience of watching Faraquet ten years earlier, and for that I’m not taking responsibility. They were boring. After that I re-wrote them off.

So, it’s March 2010, and Wade tells me, the new Medications record is SO GOOD. I’m skeptical. A month later, I get around to downloading it. And what the fuck, WHERE did this shit come from. This is hands-down the catchiest, most streamlined, most well-constructed math-rock record I’ve heard in years. D.C. indie rock has always had a respect for songwriting that contributed to its popularity, and Completely Removed exemplifies that tendency to an extent that few bands from the capital have in the last ten years. When combined with the band’s complicated, off-kilter rhythms and guitar arrangements, this commitment to songwriting also allows the record to function as a revitalization of math-rock, which, I have to say, has become somewhat decadent and obnoxious (bonus fat!)in the past few years, to the detriment of the music. I’m not prepared to say that this is the record that Faraquet should have made ten years ago, but this is certainly the reaction that I was hoping to have to that record.

One thing that I was surprised by when listening to this record is the way a little bit of a soul influence has crept into the band’s singing. This is easiest to hear on “Long Day-” this is a low-quality rip that’s been sped up for some reason, but you can hear what I’m talking about:

This is not something unique to Medications; the Dirty Projectors have also taken some steps in this direction, with confusing results:

And of course, there’s Pattern is Movement:

(Here’s what their original music sounds like)

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this trend, but I do know that I prefer the Medications record to any of this other stuff.

Anyway, thanks to Wade for hounding me about this band, and thanks to NAP for having me back.