Modern Medicine

I know practically nothing about the band School Drugs. I saw their name in the past and thuoght it was a stupid name so avoided listening to them. But a couple of months ago when I visited Indecision Records HQ and picked up half of the label's output from the last four years, I picked up the band's first full length, and a few weeks later I have really gotten into this one. With hidsight it seems that I managed to just about grab a copy before the first pressing copies sold out, as a second pressing is now available.

The record is called 'Modern Medicine' and was initially pressed on two different splatter vinyl colours. The rare colour was sold out, but that was ok with me as I think the more common one looked a little bit more acceptable. This colour is out of 500 copies and kinda suits the artwork.

This thing sounds like several different styles all at once, but generally sounds like 80s hardcore punk. There are two songs that really do sound a lot like Black Flag for a few seconds, but don't let that put you off if Flag ain't your thing. This band really do manage to mix up the styles here, but not in a disjointed way. It's super hard for me to describe what this is like, but what I can say is that when I first played it I thought it was a little all over the place, and then after a few plays I found it worming it's way onto my daily play list, because it's interesting, fun, intense and melodic. There ten songs on here and it's all done and dusted in about eighteen minutes, and everytime I'm really getting into it I realise it's almost over.

This was originally released at the back end of 2019, so this record is now almost three years old (although obviously a couple of those years were lost to Covid so don't really count). There's also a 7" that came out last year on Indecision that I failed to pick up (but now need to), but I'm already looking forward to more from this band. I hope there's a new one coming soon because these 18 minutes are just not enough to keep me going.