Steady Diet Of Nothing confirms Fugazi's inexhaustible repertoire of musical drama, enriched here with new expressive forms that concentrate in depth on the possibilities of American hardcore. The Sonic Youth-esque "Reclamation" and the maelstrom of wild distortion and tribal pulsation on the title track hover in hallucinatory climates, at once defying hardcore convention and staying rooted in the techniques of rock. Sounds go adrift into an ocean of brutality, much in the vein of Big Black.

Co-frontmen Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto experiment with a new rock language, in which songs are always in motion (typically in an obsessive crescendo, fractured and deformed by numerous discontinuities). "Nice New Outfit" is the most melodic song on the album, but nonetheless awash in a frenzied and tribal sound. "KYEO," a more driving track, is marked by hysterical quivers. They are all attempts to build music even more diagonal, less linear and therapeutically shocking. Sonic Youth's influence is particularly conclusive here, in the way Fugazi mixes rock and dissonance.

Fugazi return to more traditional hardcore elsewhere, but still with a dark, paranoid expressiveness. "Exit Only" alternates from jumpy syncopations (in the style of the Pere Ubu) to violent boogies, while "Runaway Return" exploits the band's arsenal of howls, breaks, progressions and repetitions. "Latin Roots" is devastated by thundering phrases of all the instruments. To emerge in these storms of Wagnerian intensity, MacKaye and Picciotto, our two "actors," must scream out of their mind, abdicating to any aesthetic ambition. No less appealing is the ghostly "Long Division," accompanied only by bass and guitar.

Fugazi's lucid understanding of the dynamics of hardcore music leads them to new heights of physical, moral and spiritual expression with Steady Diet Of Nothing, arguably their sonic masterpiece.