If you first came around to Laura Pleasants’ guitar playing through the maximalist, effects-soaked sludging she brought to Kylesa – the cult metal quartet she co-founded in Savannah, Georgia, in the early ’00s – the sound of her current solo project, the Discussion, might come as a surprise.
On her debut album, All the Pretty Flowers, the now Los Angeles-based musician pulled herself away from a swampy drop-G aesthetic to explore a more harmonically approachable standard tuning. While stripping away her muddiest tendencies, she discovered a skeletal guitar style inspired by Siouxsie and the Banshees/Magazine guitarist John McGeoch and minimal wave music.
