Some records captivate with their precision—their formal beauty, each chord progression a march toward perfection. But others, like I Love You So by Retail Drugs – the music project of Jake Brooks, who describes the band’s sound as “cassette tape music” – find beauty by breaking the rules. On this scruffy, excellent LP melodies are buried, not elevated; each musical phrase pushes at its outer limits like a river bursting its banks, flooding the dry spaces around the song. Bad news for would-be reviewers: Brook’s canny “tascam music” branding aside, it’s hard to describe this kind of fuzzy, lurching music without clumsy talk of “sonic cathedrals” or references to Isn’t Anything.
But let’s try. Grab a copy of this record, and find a batch of really great little songs – loud snippets of chaos and quiet reveries: adventures that begin with a hum, a crackle—the sound of guitars and drums stretching loose until they’re shifted into strange, unnameable shapes. Sound feasting on itself— songs that are dark, lovely, sometimes insubstantial, blurred at the edges.
Like a motorbike revving, the hum frequently erupts. And jagged, distorted guitars swirl, brittle, broken, bending but never breaking. Basslines pulse deep, distorted, slipping under your skin – a beat you almost grasp but lose. Vocals as chants, soft slow whispers crack—distant, half-heard: “I get it right sometimes / I can’t stop that slipping on ice / I can feel it breaking under me / And I don’t care.”
At times, the sound caves in on itself. Tones blur, like light just out of focus. A receding headache, memory of shrieking cicadas.
The final minute of ‘Control’ is spectacularly lovely, as is ‘Net’, with its downbeat confession: “Everyone dies sometimes.”
This is deeply instinctual and unfamiliar stuff. It has the air of walking home late at night in a built-up area. Last bus gone. Rain sliding off your black jacket, pockets of skin. The blue light. You hear the sound of muffled music filtering through walls of darkened warehouses as you walk. Thudding, indistinct, electric – the accidental sounds of some unnameable nearby performance.
You stop and listen; try to tune in.
The entire album exists in that space: harsh but beautiful, lost yet present. Songs slip through your fingers, never fully starting or ending—just shifting in the night air. Feedback curling, drums rattling like machinery on the verge of collapse.
The risks here are worth it. ‘Dubl Vision’ is wild, like Steve Malkmus rapping over old-school hip-hop on a broken tape deck. ESG doing the Beastie Boys.
“It’s the end of my road / my journey, my road to shore / when I do see the world and the sun / I will see the world.”
Retail Drugs: a lovely marriage of discordance and harmony…. chaos contained, but barely. I like it a lot.
But anyway,
It’s fine. I’ll walk
home from here, after I’ve stopped for a while.
Written by Jonathan Shipley
