Even within the band’s ramshackle early days, the Conflict on Medicine’ music may change the size of a room. They didn’t obtain this feat by way of sheer quantity alone (although songs like “Present Me The Coast” or “It’s Your Future” may attain intimidating decibel ranges) however by way of scope: monumental feelings peeking by way of the curtain of incandescent synths and droning guitar. They made hanging in a dingy rock membership watching 4 wiry Philly dudes conjure a multicolored squall really feel like standing on the sting of a cliff, the universe roaring in your ears that you simply’re smaller than you assume. When the Conflict on Medicine grew to a sextet to carry Misplaced within the Dream’s variegated haze to the stage, their sound pushed towards the rafters of thousand-cap venues, absolutely realizing the type of immensity music writers like to name “stadium-sized.”
LIVE DRUGS, the band’s first reside album, collected soundboard recordings from 2014 to 2019, specializing in cuts from Misplaced within the Dream and A Deeper Understanding. 4 years later, they’re again with LIVE DRUGS AGAIN, sourcing takes from their 2022 and 2023 runs. Like its predecessor, LIVE DRUGS AGAIN appears like a single present, one the place you lucked into the proper spot in entrance of the soundboard, awestruck by a band that exudes the ineffable mixture of tour-tight and informal. LIVE DRUGS AGAIN is an growth in some ways: The band added multi-instrumentalist Eliza Hardy Jones in 2022, and the set attracts closely from 2021’s shimmering prairiecore opus I Don’t Stay Right here Anymore. It’s much more painstakingly assembled—Granduciel stitched this model of “Underneath the Stress,” for instance, from six totally different performances. Right here, the music doesn’t smear collectively into a phenomenal mass just like the sound of the Conflict on Medicine of yore; as an alternative, it builds right into a towering, advanced construction.
This new, seven-piece configuration of the Conflict on Medicine performs with outstanding persistence. There’s a newfound—or at the least newly emphasised—consideration to the interlocking rhythms that bolster the songs’ swooning Heartland core. Granduciel’s solos aren’t as jammy as up to now, buying and selling the minutes-long shred periods for a extra measured tackle hypnotic maximalism. The band assembles “Dwelling Proof” brick by brick, beginning with sixteenth-note guitar strums, then including eighth-note hi-hats, syncopated bass drums, and that hooky keyboard line that hovers in a fog of reverb. It’s nearly techno-like in development, meticulously constructing pressure and ending in a quietly cathartic payoff when the groove downshifts into its roots-rock coda. Throughout some songs, you may pick one component—the dusty Linn Drum spine of “Burning,” Dave Hartley’s motorik bassline throughout “Gradual Ghost”—and comply with it like a single stream into an amazing waterfall.
