Reading Between The Lines: Flagpole Mar. 17th - Medications feature by Jeff Tobias

Listen: you’ve seen Rush in Rio, right?

I’ve seen Blame It On Rio, the 1984 comedy starring Michael Caine as a man who has an affair with his best friend’s barely legal daughter. The film was marketed with the tagline, "She's the hottest thing on the beach. She's also his best friend's daughter!"

It’s not hard to find; it’s the DVD with the purple dragon on the cover - the purple dragon with the Chiquita banana headdress.

That’s not helping. And it is hard to find. At the very least I didn’t see it at Eastside Vision Video.
What treasures await you on this glorious digital video disc? Classics such as “YYZ,” “The Spirit of Radio,” and “By-Tor and the Snow Dog;” a few solos (a lot of solos);

Oh, you mean the band Rush. But to answer your question: No, I have not seen Rush in Rio. And I have not heard Rush in a very very long time. So I guess Rush is coming to town? That’s pretty cool, I guess.

punctuations of the band’s patently Canadian - uh, “quirky” - sense of humor.
(Alex Lifeson: “This is jazz. Jazz… is weird.”

I'm not sure Mr. Lifeson's humor is very funny. And I have no idea how it is Canadian, let alone patently Canadian. It may be quirky, but whether or not it is "quirky" is open to debate.

Yeah, dude, so is pushing a female cop down a flight of stairs).

And that humor is really not funny. Which means that Jeff Tobias is now officially less funny than Alex Lifeson from Rush. Congratulations.

Also: 40,000 Brazilians absolutely losing their goddamn minds.

I do not think I will be purchasing/renting this video anytime soon.

So, it makes good horse sense that these people, these Portuguese-speaking aesthetes, would love them some Medications. Because you see, Medications - currently comprised of Devin Ocampo and Chad Molter - have dedicated their musical careers to something a little like Rush, a little like The Who, a little like King Crimson, but always, always, with an ingredient these honestly great bands have always lacked: humility.

Whoa. Wait. All that shit about Rush was just a lead-in to some band coming to town who has ‘dedicated their musical careers [sic] to something a little like Rush’?

By working exclusively with Washington, DC’s standard-bearer of music industry ethics, Dischord Records (with both Medications and their former project Faraquet), Ocampo and Molter have, career-wise, driven home the point of punk rock: the music can be glorious and powerful, but people are people.

First off, I believe that ‘people are people’ was the message of Depeche Mode, not punk rock. And 'music can be glorious and powerful' was Led Zeppelin's, or even Van Halen's message, but I am pretty sure that 'music can be glorious and powerful' was not the message of the Sex Pistols, or The Clash, or Buzzcocks, or Rancid, or Avril Lavigne. I always thought punk rock’s message was “anyone can create art regardless of their technical ability, as long as it has passion and is original".

Second off, Dischord Records is signing bands that sound like Rush?!?



Oh. I guess they aren't. It sounds to me like Dischord is signing bands that sound like either singer from Fugazi fronting a band that plays in unusual time signatures. We know Medications are good at fractions, but how good are they at converting them into decimals? And are they so good at fractions that instead of dividing up their paychecks they multiply their paycheck by its reciprocal?

Devin Ocampo sings like an ordinary guy because he is one.

Maybe. Or maybe he sings like a Fugazi guy because he wants to be one.

Now sit back and prepare to read one of the most dull interviews a band has ever given.

“Faraquet had split up by 2001, and it wasn’t the type of situation where we were going on hiatus; we were done,” says Chad Molter, emailing Flagpole from his home in Denver. “So, we all moved on to doing separate things. Devin and I continued to play music in different projects until our paths crossed again with Medications.” The differences between Faraquet and Medications are akin to those of two close but distinct brothers. Guitar lines and vocals hit points and counterpoints, always with muscular confidence (not macho posturing). The main element, it seems, is always rhythm: Ocampo and Molter are both, by turns, excellent drummers.

Wait, so there’s two drummers in the band? Do they take turns? I am no longer being a smart-ass, I am honestly confused. And as long as I’m here, what exactly does “guitar lines and vocal hit point and counterpoints” sound like?

Faraquet’s martial, all-elbows approach to the so-called “Dischord sound” took a turn for the ethereal with Medications, but both are bound by Ocampo’s personalized, acrobatic guitar playing and steely vocals.

So does Ocampo play drums or not?

Molter’s contributions have been more fluid: while he’s in his more comfortable role as a punchy, aggressive bassist in Medications, he learned his way around the drums, implausibly, in the staggeringly complex setting of Faraquet. “That was basically where I learned how to play [drums], with a lot of patience and assistance from Devin,” he says. Now the two multi-instrumentalists have set out to compose a new record, taking full advantage of their combined skills, if not their proximity.

This is giving me a headache, but I think I’ve got it now. Molter plays bass in Medications, but he learned to play drums in Faraquet, which is the band these two guys were in before they were in Medications. And in Medications, they've been sharing duties because it started as a recording project. I think.

This is no longer a music feature; it is a murder mystery. If you just keep reading long enough, you learn what the story's about.

“I live in Colorado now, so we have a lot less time to collaborate in person,” explains Molter. “Lately we’ve been writing separately and then coming together and working things out for shows. The situation is a lot looser in some respects because we’ve gotten away from having a certain role or just one instrument to play in the band, which, for us, had been a bit inhibiting in the past.” Fellow jack-of-all-trades, Mark Cisneros, will be filling in the gaps live. The progression from Faraquet’s never-sit-still restlessness to the more spread out, patient state of Medications’ union has continued in their new long-distance setting.

Here’s some live Faraquet. Notice how far they've progressed. (And notice how I'm using sarcasm to set up my punchline--that wasn't too subtle was it).



Wait. So this video is of the restless band, and the other video was of the spread out, patient band? To me, these bands sound a lot alike.

It makes sense: simplify as you go. “I think that we’ve both moved toward writing songs that are a bit more stripped down in their arrangements. There isn’t as much writing going on when we get together, just some refining. All in all, the music is moving in the same trajectory, which began when we first started playing together many years ago. We’re still writing what, to us, are just weird pop songs.”

This guy and I definitely do not hear music in the same language.

Not so weird, however, that they would alienate our South American neighbors.

Well, thank christ for that. We’ve got enough problems with Venezuela as it is.

It seems like most of the band’s touring as of late has been in Brazil: “We were contacted, pretty much out of the blue, by a Brazilian production company, and, after working out some details,

Money.

we decided to go. The Faraquet tour happened in a similar way. When Medications played Brazil we discovered that there were some Faraquet fans hiding amongst the general population, so, with the help of a lot of really great people we had met over there, we decided to do some shows as Faraquet. We never really intended to get Faraquet back together,

But they offerred us money.

but when we decided to finally re-release some material that had long been out of print, we started talking about doing a few shows or possibly a short tour or two. With the exception of a few shows in Brazil and one in DC, that never panned out. Devin and I had never seriously thought about jumping back into Faraquet again. It’s hard enough to keep one band going.”

I cut & pasted this article into word so I could start fucking with it, and when I got to this part, I went back and looked because it seemed like the article had gotten cut off in the middle. But it didn’t. This is where the article ends.

Look, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Tobias. He's one of the best writers on the F-pole. Also, pre-assigned word counts are a bitch, and it’s obvious from reading the quotes off his e-mail interview (which may or may not have allowed for follow-ups) that Medications didn’t give him a whole lot to work with. And the one-sheet offered up by Dischord is even more boring, if you can believe that. You can read it if you don’t believe me.

www.dischord.com/images.d/press_release/filename/9/149_Medications.pdf

And I know the music editor is in Austin right now for SXSW, but this is one of the most confusing, poorly organized articles I’ve seen in the F-pole in some time. I had to read it three times to fully understand what the article was about. Something I haven’t had to do since they made me write that Derrida paper in college. And to put in all that effort just so I could learn that there’s a band coming to town that plays a type of music that at least a half-dozen bands in this town (yes, including We vs. the Shark) can do just as well if not better, left me feeling a little bitter. Bitter enough to spend an hour writing this anyway.

At least Tobias didn’t use the term “shuddering climaxes” to describe their music, the way the guy from Pitchfork did.

Besides, "shuddering climaxes" describes Chris Hassiotis' writing this week a lot more accurately than it describes the music of Meditations.