Tag: music

I hadn’t realized until this moment that I associate most Fugazi records with specific seasons. “13 Songs” was a winter album. “Repeater” was a summer album. “Steady Diet of Nothing” took me back to winter.

That’s appropriate, given that winters where I grew up were long and boorish, a seemingly infinite slog of depression. “Steady Diet” is kind of like that.

“Steady Diet of Nothing” is my least favorite Fugazi album, mostly because there’s so little variation to it.  The songs all have the same basic feel to them.  The dynamics that were building on “Repeater” seemed to take a back seat on this album. It felt like a much less adventurous album, as if the band had discovered a sound that they weren’t quite sure about, but were willing to play over and over and over again in hopes of getting it right.  

Fugazi didn’t evolve like I’d expected them to.

I would only discover years later that Fugazi themselves produced this album, something they’d never done before (and, I don’t think ever did again). This was obviously not the best idea, as the production is a major cause of the flatness of the album. These recordings are just not as dynamic as the songs.

Don’t get me wrong, “No Exit” has a nice climax, although it’s so insubstantial up until that point that almost anything would have felt climatic.  “Reclamation” is a stand out, and more of the type of thing I was expecting from them given the songs on “Repeater.”  But “Nice New Outfit” introduces a rhythmic guitar part that seems to show up in some form or another on multiple songs.  Coupled with the similar structure of a lot of the songs, the whole album feels monotone.

The songs aren’t as dynamic as they were on the first two albums. Fugazi was always a band that could make the most out of one or two parts for an entire song, but there was never a lack of depth or complexity. Long Division” is a great song, but it’s ostensibly one part over and over again, much the way “No Exit” was just two parts.  Everything’s at the same tempo, all the songs are fairly simple.

“Nice New Outfit” to “Stacks” to “Latin Roots” could be the most redundant section of the record. The famous start/stop dueling guitars of Fugazi are on display, but it seems like they don’t know how to use them yet.

There’s also a darkness to this album.  There was a certain amount of punk rock joy on “13 Songs,” and you could actually feel the creative excitement on “Repeater.”  That seems to have been sapped for “Steady Diet of Nothing.”

The successful songs on this record are the ones that have a hook of some kind. “Reclamation” is a classic, built around a singular guitar sound and a wonderful bass line. “Polish” is the culmination of what every other song on this record was trying to do. “KYEO” could have been on “Repeater.” The duel vocals push the song forward and the alternate chorus elevates the song and the final few “we will not be beaten down” resonate in a way that nothing else on the album does.

Looking at this record as a piece of the entire Fugazi catalog, this might be the most transitional record they produced. You can see the germs of what would become the next record already beginning to form. The Fugazi sound was starting to materialize.

Let’s face facts: a mediocre Fugazi record is still better than the majority of music out there, so this is by no means a bad album. But I was expecting something more.

I would get it in a big way with “In on the Killtaker.”

Fugazi was working class punk rock when so many other punk rock bands seemed like they were still living off their parents.

For as liberal as they were, Fugazi spoke to my blue collar surroundings and helped me to realize that those to things were not antithetical. You could sit at a crimping machine attaching truck parts together over and over again for eight hours a day, five days a week, and still believe that everyone should be treated equally, that social programs were important and should be funded, and that war was never the answer. Fugazi didn’t just talk a good game, they lived it, and that came through in their music.

Pearl Jam??

Pearl Jam doesn’t get enough credit. I think every generation has those bands who are immensely popular and are very open about their not so popular influences. Nirvana did the same thing, although they were, like most of Pearl Jam, more interested in promoting their fellow Seattle bands, the ones who had played big parts in their lives but weren’t getting the same attention.

Eddie Vedder, lead singer of Pearl Jam, was vocal about his favorite bands. He would go so far as to sing bits of their songs during concerts. Way back in my high school days, I got my first ever bootleg. It was a recording of Pearl Jam playing at a small club in Paard van Troje in the Netherlands. It was, appropriately enough, called Pearl Jam: Small Club.The 8th song of that show, after “Black” and before “Release,” was a song that Pearl Jam, to my knowledge, never actually recorded, which is for the best, as it’s not a particularly good song. On the bootleg, it’s titled “Saying No,” and it’s more or less about rape. It’s a four minute song and at the three minute mark, Eddie Vedder stops singing his own lyrics. Instead, he sings the outro of a song called “Suggestion.”

The Journey Begins

This was my introduction to Fugazi. In the winter of ’94, I had a CD player, but I didn’t use it much. I was still mostly listening to casettes, so that’s what I bought: “7 Songs” (sometimes known as “Fugazi”) by Fugazi which included not only the aforementioned “Suggestion,” but “Waiting Room,” which was, for whatever reason, Fugazi’s best known song. It was easily my favorite on that tape, although I loved “Bad Mouth” an awful lot, too.

Not long after that, I got “Margin Walker,” the cassette that made up the other half of Fugazi’s first EP, “13 Songs.” “Margin Walker” solidified my enjoyment of Fugazi, as the songs began to become more complicated. That opening to “Margin Walker” (the song), the bass line in “And the Same,” the vocals in “Burning, Too” – all great stuff. And that’s ignoring what was, I had been told, Fugazi’s real classic, “Promises.”

At this point in my life, I knew enough about guitar/bass/drums/vocals music to appreciate well crafted, creative songs when I heard them. The only hesitance I really had to fully embracing Fugazi was Ian McKaye’s voice. His were not the polished vocals that I was used to. Even the other non-mainstream bands I listened to (Jawbox, Sunny Day Real Estate, Velocity Girl) had, if not clear, than clean vocals. McKaye sounded like he was grunting out his lyrics, which took some time for me to get used to. Fortunately, I took to Guy Picciotto’s vocals right away.

But as much as I liked “13 Songs,” I hadn’t completely fallen for Fugazi. No, that would happen when I quickly moved to “Repeater.”