The title means “Hits” in Spanish, recalling the commercials you see late at night on Spanish television advertising albums of “20 Grandes Exitos!!!” Though Brad Laner calls L.A. home, don’t expect the former evil genius of bands Amnesia and Medicine to show up to accept a Latin Grammy any time soon. Rather, Exitos is the latest update from a man who has descended further and further into worship at the temple of the glitch, and this time out he’s affiliated with the Tigerbeat6 gang of nogoodniks.
Actually, the influence of Tigerbeat6 acts like Kid606 and Lesser seems to have inspired Laner to dig deeper and darker into his post-major label existence (his abrasive Studio City saw an unlikely release on Island, where it’s digital shock value probably scared the dickens out of some executives.) This time around he has applied more structure and surprisingly, many more listener-friendly touches to his bleeps and blips. Many of the sounds on Exitos are of the bleep and blip rather than the screech and feedback varieties, and shaped into more song-like structures. Most of the tracks here have a steady rhythm, a few even come with a discernible microscopic beat, allowing the ear to follow these snips of sound down strange dark halls.
