Here we go, an entry from Fugazi who are arguably one of my favourite bands of all time — so much so that it’s very likely I’d probably pick one of their albums in one of those Desert Island Discs features. I’ll get into that more further down. Despite mentioning them in another piece here before, if anything I was resistant to do one of these features for one of the band’s many songs over a run of incredible albums — not to mention hundreds of shows the band played touring over their fifteen years of active existence. Although Fugazi have never technically disbanded, they have been on “hiatus” since 2002 with members of the band going onto numerous different musical projects.
About a month or so ago I went to a friend’s DJ set that came about at last minute in the west end of Glasgow. I got the invite to come on down and upon arrival at the venue after a short bike rike, outside on the wall by the front menu I quickly took a look at the menu and they were offering a “Fugazi Side Salad” which I found amusing. This likely has nothing to due with the band, if anything because the ingredients in this salad made no sense. Rocket (also known as arugala for those in North America), cherry tomatoes, pickled red onions, parmesan… these ingredients to me had nothing to do with the band in symbolic terms, athough a couple of ingredients are from Italian cuisine, and band member Guy Picciotto comes from that heritage. It’s anyone’s guess really. That prompted me to thing about them and some of their tracks of theirs that had crossed my ears in the past short while.
Coming of age and getting into more experimental, punk-influenced music in the early 1990s I had heard 1991’s Steady Diet Of Nothing — which this featured track is the opener of that album — and I instantly made a connection to the band, as if I were waiting for them to show up in my life. Then soon enough the follow up album — 1993’s In On The Killtaker — came out, and it was the first album I waited on for its release date and bought that album on CD during a family vacation on Whidbey Island in Washington state.
While to the listener who remains distant from their music and note their politics or focus strangely on guitarist/vocalist Ian MacKaye and his apparent straight edge lifestyle, for me there’s just a good number of musical ideas and techniques at play across their albums: a mastery of feedback, fret harmonics, the band’s occasional and very effective use of start-and-stop dynamics and more so their fusion of my different influences, including hardcore, noise (rock), dub reggae, funk and I dare say it, the more interesting and experimental aspects of rock music from the 60s and 70s — especially with albums like Red Medicine (1995) and onwards.
It’s noted in interviews and other written material that the band weren’t entirely happy with the sonic outcome of Steady Diet Of Nothing — an album mainly produced by the band themselves.
Moving onto their next album, In On The Killtaker, the band actually originally recorded that album with the renowed and recently passed engineer Steve Albini, whom the band knew well. However, the band felt the sessions were rushed and not showcasing their best performances so they ended up re-recording the record again with producer Ted Niceley and that’s the recording you hear on the record. It’s full and packs punch but it definitely has a more “colder” tonal profile — and more dissonant and noisier — than their following 1995 album Red Medicine, which saw the band back with their main engineer of choice, Don Zientara, and for me at the time — probably around 17 years old — was sort of a revolutionary change in the band’s sound. It’s warmer, with different and varied guitar tones that implies a lot of other, broader influences in the vast canon of rock and roll music that would set the tonal blueprint for the band’s remaining albums, culminating in their final masterpiece, 2001’s The Argument.
Re-focusing back on to “Exit Only”, for me this track also has a very unusual — and likely seldom used — term that is highlighted as the “chorus” of this song, and that is the term sympatric, which Picciotto repeats over and over, with the instruments of the band sharply punctuating that single word.
sympatric : (of animals or plant species or populations) occurring within the same or overlapping geographical areas.
Followed by, “I’ll meet you, I will meet you, I’ll meet you at the exit.”
It’s great, summarises a somewhat complex situation in literally one word and for me highlights the band’s interesting and unique use of words and language in their lyrics to add colour, express themselves and inspire imagery in the words the band is singing about, rather that using often used tropes that bands tend to use within the genre they’re working in.
With myself listening to a lot of different genres, I can say that from my own perspective a lot of the lyrics in more dark/synth music can be boring, overused, banal and cliché — but then again, it’s likely because in that genre the details of the lyrics perhaps aren’t the focus, and in many cases, written by lyricists working in a language that’s not their mother tongue.
In the late 1990s, a documentary about the band called Instrument was released, which was a collaboration of the band with their close friend, filmmaker and photographer Jem Cohen. I’m obviously going to be a bit biased here but for me it’s probably one of the best (and most beautiful) music documentaries about a band that one can watch. It takes a fresh, artistic and more abstract approach, eschewing the usual reliance on long interviews with band members and those close to them and mainly relying on many years of live footage of the band shot by Cohen and other show attendees, more abstract incidental film footage, a few archived TV interviews with members of the band as well as amazing interwoven footage of random profiles of show attendees and more. It makes for a powerful impression of one of the better live bands that ever existed, and stands out as an amazing piece of art on its own.
The live footage is outstanding and magnetic, especially as it’s known (and as the band mentions in the film) the band plays without a set list — they just work off subtle cues and eye contact for the band to know the next song they’re going into, which is a feat unto itself. There’s often Soft Riot shows where most of the songs I just pick at random, only knowing the first one or two songs I’m going to play and then feel out the rest. However, this is far easier playing solo live where there’s no need to communicate that to other members (which don’t exist) in the live performance.
So also included below is a low resolution upload of the documentary on YouTube that one can watch for free, but you can also rent/buy the full resolution version of the video here, or just buy the thing on DVD here (this is from Norman Records in the UK and the DVD in PAL format).
There’s also a newly released documentary that came out about the band called We Are Fugazi From Washington D.C., that I haven’t seen yet, and I think perhaps has a more traditional approach to showcasing the band, with interviews from numerous musicians inspired by the band and others involved in working with them. The trailer for that one is included as well below.
As mentioned earlier, Fugazi would for me be one of those bands that would fulfill my desire for an album to be nominated for a Desert Island Disc, where if I had one album to choose when being stranded on some random island somewhere in the middle of the ocean it would be one of their albums. I used to think it would be a toss up between In On The Killtaker or Red Medicine — the former included as it was the first of their albums I totally devoured. However when thinking about it Red Medicine would work better in the end due to the more varied tones and moods on the record.
You just have to concentrate and envision yourself many years down the road, stranded on some remote atoll in the Pacific. Your clothes are the frayed remains of a burlap sack, your grey hair is down to your knees and you’ve gone insane due to the lack of human contact and likely a barrage of tropical diseases that have eaten most of your brain away. You can see yourself holding seashells in each hand grooving to the jams of the instrumental track “Combination Lock” — see below with some great, restrained yet creative drum work by Brendan Canty — from the barely functioning tape deck/radio that has miraculously survived while you’re in some mental stupor, drunk on some crude coconut wine you’ve made in the remains of a rusted metal gas tank, dancing away with all of the friends you’ve made up in your head.
One final note here. There is a great, detailed and extensive podcast series called End On End that endeavours to cover each release in the Dischord Records catalogue, starting with the label’s first release — the Minor Disturbance EP by The Teen Idles from all the way back in 1980. Currently the podcast is up to releases that came out in the mid-90s. You can check out the episode about the Steady Diet Of Nothing album that pairs up the hosts with bassist Joe Lally for a long four-hour discussion about the album. The Spotify link is found below but it’s also available on Apple Podcasts and more.