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It's usually okay to assume that bands tend to get better with experience.  Dead Poetic is no different.  New Medicines is certainly the expected step up from Four Wall Blackmail.  As the band's second release for Solid State, it certainly meets expectations: The group's half scream-half sing rock-as-much-as-we-can sound has been developed, tweaked, and otherwise pleasantly toyed with to create a somewhat finer incarnation.  There are a number of more clearly defined melodies in the always-enjoyable guitar parts, and this time around the singing outweighs the screaming, counterbalancing the latter parts of Four Wall Blackmail.  Overall it is perhaps a more user-friendly Dead Poetic.

And that, frankly, is the only problem.  As much as I hate to say it, New Medicines appears to be a product of the appeal-to-the masses method of music-making.  Stylistically there is little to separate this work from the vast majority of what is floating around radio-acceptable hard rock nowadays.  Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing album.  The first track hits with a driving drum beat and a well-screamed opening phrase, the title track is incredibly well done, and lyrically interesting, and all the rest are saturated with that "something" that makes a truly solid record.  It is just a bit irksome that a band that seriously and genuinely rocks is put at risk of being lumped together with "everything else". 

Will New Medicines heal your lame-music ills?  Very likely.  Ultimately it's the perfect springboard point for a band with the amount of potential that Dead Poetic has: like all the others, but better.

Joel Roddin 5/26/04

The title refers to the  “new medicines” we take in today's society to "heal" the void in our hearts. Therefore there is a certain brutality included in the lyrics. There is still a mild feeling of politics, as was present on their previous record, but this CD portrays more of a message of pain and fighting back. 

Dead Poetic brings a certain wordplay and poetic feeling to the song structure in New Medicines that makes each song enigmatic. Although the previous CD, Four Wall Blackmail, was loose and more original to the feel, this tight CD is more formulaic emo-core. A few of the songs even sound exactly like Blindside's new stuff, with some Emery in the background. 

New Medicines has a more professional sound. It is a solid effort that should be liked by some but not so much by others, and that’s cool.

Len Nash 5/26/2004