Fugazi
Red Medicine
»
Fugazi
Red Medicine
Dischord, 1995
RiYL: If you don't like Fugazi...???? |
I thought about it for a little while. Obviously, the $6 concert tickets are pretty great, but you can't apply that to this discussion. Then I started listing some traits. Intensity. Honesty. Precision. Efficiency. All of these apply to Fugazi. By definition, almost. It's not like any one song is going to be less intense or precise or efficient than another. The band has a skill for arrangements that's almost unparallelled. Each song is constructed to make its riffs and message hit as hard as possible.
A "slower" song -- "Pink Frosty" on End Hits, or "Rend It" on In On The Kill Taker -- is only slower in the tempo sense, only softer in the volume sense. The point hits just as hard, and the reason the change in dynamics was selected is because the band thought it would better serve the song. It's therefore quite difficult to compare and contrast Fugazi records. Let's try and go by process of elimination.
13 Songs, I think, should be excluded from the discussion, since it was not meant to be listened to as a single album. Also, the instrumental tracks for the first EP were recorded without Guy Picciotto, meaning the complexity of the guitars on that record, no slight to Ian MacKaye, is not comparable to the rest of the band's stuff.
Instrument obviously is disqualified because it's not an album, merely a number of germs which later went on to be parts of albums, or were discarded. That leaves us with (chronologically) Repeater, Steady Diet Of Nothing, In On The Kill Taker, Red Medicine and End Hits. As you can probably guess from the title of this page, my choice for best Fugazi album is Red Medicine.
Let me explain why. All of those five albums are very solid. All have intensity and precision. But the one I listen to the most often, and think of first when I think Fugazi, is Red Medicine. Not for any technical, emotional, or political reason. For pop hooks.
That's right, pop hooks. All Fugazi albums rock, all of them have great shouting vocals, all of them have terrific driving drums. But Red Medicine, to me, is the most hummable, the one with the most insistent melodies and the catchiest choruses. The lo-fi instrumental passages that separate the studio tracks on the album only serve to make the contrast more clear.
"Bed For The Scraping," "Do You Like Me," "Target." All of these songs have GREAT hooks and the usual Fugazi drive and attitude. The lyrics on this record also seem particularly strong to me, maybe just because I've listened to this album so many more times than the other Fugazi albums. I love Guy's spitting "Lockheed, Lockheed, Martin Marietta" on "Do You Like Me," Ian's whisper/chant of the chorus to "Birthday Pony," and Joe's restrained "By You."
So there you go. Vote Red Medicine. It has the endorsement of Western Homes. And what more can you ask?
MARK T.R. DONOHUE | Mark T.R. Donohue is a prolific freelance writer whose areas of expertise include Rockies baseball, video games, genre television, English soccer, and pub rock. He lives in Colorado, where he cultivates the largest and creepiest private collection of Alyson Hannigan memorabilia in the Mountain West.