Tag: Retail Drugs

Retail Drugs is a recording project of Jake Brooks from Laveda and it dropped an album on August 2, 2024 called i love you so! These songs are almost like an alternate reality version of the kind of music Brooks does in Laveda. They feel wonderfully and charmingly rough hewn like home demos recorded to cassette with the blown out sonics left in, the distortion overwhelming the mic a little. But the vulnerability is still there and though Brooks’ vocals are behind the mix a little you can feel the raw sincerity in them especially when the heated white noise of clears in moments. Like the words sung are saying things that while heartfelt might sound to you a little too real. But on a song like “Stairs” the music is instantly reminiscent of 2000s and early 2010s bands like Times New Viking, Tyvek, No Age, Eat Skull and artists on the Siltbreeze imprint generally and how the intentionality of that kind of unvarnished sound is part of the point of the music. It would be difficult to co-opt and mass market yet has an undeniable appeal to people who can hear through it all the attempt to capture unfiltered emotion and offer that up as an experience that anyone open to it can find relatable. The relative sprawl of “Net” is intimate and gorgeous in its fragile delicacy and even its “imperfections” lend its expressions of radical vulnerability the evocative power of a confessional letter one intends for someone important in your life but which you can never bring yourself to deliver. But the album doesn’t stay lurking in the fog of overwhelming feelings and distorted atmospheres. “Sea (Fade Away)” is a more lo-fi acoustic pop song that unexpectedly veers into a moody bit of warping and bending slowcore. Did Brooks just use a 4-track to record these songs? If not he did a good job of faking it and thus giving the album’s nine songs a freshness and purity that comes from going into making music for the joy of it and not aiming for a specific audience and letting one’s creativity and instincts be the guide. A lot of music is put in the world as “lo-fi” but it’s just poorly recorded music. Brooks seems to have tapped into the creative potential of that sensibility in itself and turning the limitations into a virtue. Listen to i love you so! on Spotify and follow Retail Drugs on Instagram.