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May 12, 2023 Web Exclusive By Mark Moody

Ky Brooks’ (who uses they/them pronouns) first solo outing, Power Is The Pharmacy, puts their poetry on display with improvisational, and often challenging, soundscapes. Brooks is a veteran of the underground Montreal experimental music scene and was lead vocalist for Lungbutter, whose sole album, Honey, came out shortly before Dry Cleaning’s first music and shared the visceral hook of spoken word vocals over noise and punk inspired backing tracks. In another world, the band’s “Flat White” would have rivaled anything their UK contemporaries had going on early this decade.

Sadly, Lungbutter’s drummer, Joni Sadler, died of a brain aneurism during Canada’s protracted COVID-19 lockdown. Some two years on, Brooks’ album deals with the deep grief of having lost a close friend and bandmate and other more oblique topics. Starting with the album’s title track, the first thing we hear are Brooks’ heavily manipulated and looped vocals. Inspired by a quote from Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, the song imagines a reverse chewing up (or out as it were) of all that life devours. The song references an invisible jaw “that is strong enough to put anything back the way it should be.” (Given the album’s industrial bent, the image of a giant machine that grinds up asphalt roads putting them smoothly back in place also comes to mind.) The song’s dread inducing instrumentation and Brooks’ spoken word vocals recall the opening moments of Laurie Anderson’s “From the Air.”

The tracks on Power Is The Pharmacy revolve around an improvised session with James Goddard (sax/electronics), Andrés Salas (electronics), and Nick Schofield (organ/synths). As on “Power Is The Pharmacy” other musicians contributed remotely to the recording session, with Farley Miller’s drum work particularly standing out on the four tracks he contributed to. The meditative rumination “All the Sad and Loving People” is also a remembrance of Sadler and one that seesaws along a synth loop that recalls the downcast spell of “Eleanor Rigby” with the sparest of vocal accompaniment.

More conventional approaches are taken elsewhere. “The Dancer” burbles along with a heavy laden groove, finger snaps, and Brooks’ leaning more towards singing than speaking. Things get denser over the song’s course, but still make for one of the album’s more approachable moments. While “Dragons” runs over seven minutes, but also manages to maintain its structure. The song is powered by Miller’s drums and the heavily treated and twisted guitars of Mat Ball. Brooks brings their most compelling vocal as well, making the song some kind of sonically darker twin to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light’s most prickly passages.

From its opening moments, Power Is The Pharmacy makes clear that following Brooks’ down their path is not without its challenges, but also has its inherent rewards. Brooks surrounded themselves with talented musicians willing to create a singular work with a penchant for not following standard structures. Brooks’ own courses aren’t linear either and one of the most striking lyrical passages from Revolving Door bears that out: “In the morning/I approached my dream/From behind/And I stole its magic.” A kinetic and provocative thought that cements the physicality and active creativity that Brooks has set down over the course of their album. (www.ky-mtl.bandcamp.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10