Brad Laner at home

Ahh, Brad Laner. Recently, I’ve been picking up cds of albums I had as cassettes, and Medicine has been on constant rotation at work and in the car. He made three perfect shoegaze/noise/pop albums in the 90s, returned Medicine to active duty quickly in the 00s with an interesting IDM album (not exactly my cup of tea, but hey, not everything is).  Anyway, I’ll post more on Medicine later, but having been listening to Medicine recently, I decided to find out what Mr. Laner was up to.

Turns out he hasn’t been idle. In 2007, he put out Neighbor Singing, an absolute gem of an album on home-tapes. While it does sound slightly odd (especially having listened to Medicine so much recently), it really sums up his musical career rather well. Parts Beach Boys, Animal Collective, IDM-lite, folk, and his signature guitar, I haven’t heard an album this refreshing in a long time. Then, turns out he has a new one due out! Then, reading his tumblr page, turns out he has no idea when it’ll come out. So, I guess we’ll just have to deal with what we have now…which isn’t a bad thing at all.

Brad Laner - Neighbor Singing

“June Gloom” from Neighbor Singing

Images and mp3 from home-tapes.com

It’s hard to underestimate how much the music of Luke Sutherland has shaped my musical taste throughout the year. I remember back in ‘95 or so, I was working at Waves music, and we received Long Fin Killie’s debut, Houdini. Really The cover interested me, so I opened it up and threw it into the cd player. Turned out to be a pretty good choice. Probably the biggest impression on the album was the song “Hollywood Gem.” 

After two more albums,

So, I think this is the third time that I’ve actually tried to start a blog. Never could get it right…or something. Anyway, I’ve got the whole thing figured out; I just needed to have something completely unique to add to the world of blogging. So, here it is: I’m going to write about music movies, books, and other things that I like!!! Seriously, how awesome is that??? Off we go!