Medicine – Shot Forth Self Living (1992)

I’m kind of fed up with opening social media every day and coming across ‘this record completes X years today’, because I’m old and boring, and in general seeing so many albums that I love reaching 20, 30, 40 years old , reminds me that I, too, am getting olderCUM.

Digressions and/or grumbles aside, I have avoided such ephemeris, but I can’t escape some of them. It is the case of Shot forth self living, debut of Brad Laner and his Medicine, which now in September (the 15th, exactly), reached 3 decades. 3 fuckin’ decades.

This album is part of that list of fundamental rocks of alternative rock for those who really lived the role there in the nineties, present in the collective imagination of the people who ran after what was not in everyone’s ears, the ‘indie true’ (hahaha). 30 years later, it remains a little classic lost amid the avalanche of distortions of the time.

Laner, a kind of Yankee offspring of Kevin Shields – and one of the great heroes of independent rock, still active and releasing great works – sewed here shoegaze, dream pop and a lot of noise in melodies that, under this load of noise, keep a spirit pop, ‘sweet’ and easily assimilable, at least for the regulars (laughs). Songs like “Aruca”, “Defective” and “Miss drugstore” (❤️❤️❤️) are living proof of that.

And if the whole gazer thing started in the old continent, the land of Uncle Sam brought us Medicine (as well as Swirlies, Lilys, Starflyer 59, Drop Nineteens…) and in a new generation the great Ringo Deathstarr, which in my ears sounds clearly influenced by, among others, the band of the great Brad Laner and especially his Shot forth self living.

rediscover.