Medication - Judgement Day EP (2011) [Sacred Bones] // Grade: B+

Mike Hyde: picture of a tortured artist? Who knows what really happens in the Medication man’s brain, but if his songs signify any one thing, it’s a whole mess of internal struggle. The moody  garage of the Judgment Day EP—a sorta-kinda follow-up to 2009’s Hozac full-length—weaves around texture and theme, this psychedelic web of smoky noise and religious imagery, but always circles back to its agonized center. This is music for misery and hysterics. You know, real Syd Barrett in a closet, channeling the demons stuff.

And actually, the Syd Barrett thing runs a little deeper than psychedelic madness. Hyde’s voice, a warm but nasal whine, shares the same perpetual ache as Barrett’s, the music a ghostly reference to his bluesy confusion. But then there’s also the Stooges thing and the Nick Drake thing and even the Blank Dogs thing, if you feel like nitpicking the atmosphere; Hyde recorded these six songs—themselves two-year labors of love—to tape only, cloaking the EP in a druggy, rain-soaked haze. It’s lo-fi not for style’s sake, necessarily, but for reality’s.

Because that element of reality, however slippery, is at the core of Judgment Day. It permeates the record and runs concurrent to the ache, this sense of internal debate, of Hyde being the same voice as anyone you’ve ever known with a lot of puzzling life questions. The songs definitely carry a style—he writes with a lot of melodic flourish—but style isn’t only what drives them. It’s the reality of the thing. Of Hyde’s tortured artist, however real that picture may be.

- Rue Sauvage