Hidden Shoal is excited to announce the official CD release of Medicine Show, the debut solo album by musical experimentalist, Guided By Voices producer and long-time Robert Pollard collaborator Todd Tobias. All CD orders come with an immediate download of the album as well as an exclusive bonus download of the previously un-released Night Above Ground EP.
After years of producing Guided By Voices, playing in Circus Devils with Robert Pollard, and helping to create the music for Pollard’s solo albums, Todd Tobias is striking out on his own with his debut solo album. Defiantly unique and vividly realised, Medicine Show is a multi-faceted instrumental opus, evoking a shadowy steampunk dystopia. By turns nightmarish and hauntingly beautiful, the three-dimensional musical universe that Tobias conjures across 40 minutes is totally addictive. From the dark GBV-esque groove of ‘Night of the Club Foot’, through the gaseous synths of ‘Pre-Dawn Visitation’, evoking a hallucinogen-fuelled walk among a misty moon-lit forest, to the visceral lurch of single ‘Manatoc Enters The City / The Long Fall’, Medicine Show plays out like the soundtrack to a Terry Gilliam movie starring Tom Waits, each song a totally immersive scene, leading inexorably into the next.
“Call an album Medicine Show and some music buffs might expect something very different to this 15 track exercise in edgy atmospherics and controlled noise, but it’s tribute to Todd Tobias’s skill as a producer and arranger that the pace never slackens and that he’s quite effectively produced the audio equivalent of a graphic novel, one that will keep you listening right up until its cataclysmic final moments.” – DOA
Head to the Hidden Shoal Store to purchase the album on CD or in digital format. The CD comes as a limited numbered edition of 200 in a beautiful Stuart Medley designed, 4 panel gatefold with insert. All CD orders come with an immediate download of the album as well as an exclusive bonus download of the previously un-released Night Above Ground EP. Pre-orders have been extremely popular so remaining stock is limited.