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Do You Like MeFugazi

Fugazi - “Do You Like Me” (1994)

In 1994, but for a few hometown shows and a brief tour of Brazil Fugazi took a year off touring. They would return almost unrecognisable with 1995’s Red Medicine.

Guy Picciotto said:

“Red Medicine was kind of an effort to stop treating the studio like a doctor’s appointment: unpleasant but necessary. That time we decided to produce it ourselves and just try to expand the palette a bit, including more practise tape material, 8 track demos, just stratify it more geologically. We also recorded each song alone, one at a time so that they would sound distinct from one another and not all cut from the same cloth of sound.”

It can be misleading to look too intently at the portents of an album’s opening song, but lead track Do You Like Me (above) immediately sets the scene for a new Fugazi.

The record as a whole revels in revealing the more supple sound the band’s practice sessions produced. These were miles away from what we’d heard on their records, but essential in creating them, and valuable in and of of themselves.

Do You Like Me starts with an opening knockabout that’s all painfully distorted guitars, abstract, distant drums and bells, and wild feedback. Once the song kicks in it’s striking how open and quiet it seems, especially when played back-to-back with its predecessor In On The Kill Taker.

You’ve got to search for MacKaye’s guitar among Canty’s wonderfully exposed drums and Lally’s dancing bass, but after a sprightly bridge it has risen to the challenge and fights for attention with every other element in a rasping conclusion.

Picciotto’s lyrics are beautiful fragmented poetry and Do You Like Me in particular is a wonderful mess of subject matter. It takes in that year’s parole-abolishing prison reforms in Virginia and the merger of defence firms Lockheed with Bethesda, Maryland’s Martin-Marietta.

Implausibly, Picciotto ties corporate merger to the horrible uncertainty of one person’s attraction to another. The verses evoke the wired mind of someone painfully lovestruck. The ending: “I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question, I’ve got a question. Do you like me? Do you like me? Do you like me? Do you like me?” sounds like the song’s subject realising the embarrassing simplicity, the desperate binary conclusion of their frazzled train of thought.

This is the superb conflict of the mature Fugazi’s lyrics - rage at the outside world married to a growing sense and admission of the purest human emotions.

They’d written songs dealing with the personal before: Promises from 13 Songs reads like a mind wounded by its first revelation of mistrust; Long Division the ambiguity of an amicable break-up. But on Red Medicine that appealing openness is combined with music so fully-realised that it would still hold your attention as a series of instrumentals. It was a huge jump forward.

The intricate Brendan Canty-written Bed For The Scraping conjures an unclear tension. “I’m sick with this I’m sick with this / situations avoided – or just missed?” sings a frustrated MacKaye. His lyrics on Birthday Pony describe the emotionally draining effect of a perfectly ordered life.

Musically things start to switch up on Forensic Scene, a dubby and beautifully-recorded song which plaintively highlights the band’s growing ability to nurture space and melody. Fell, Destroyed features a lyrical call-out to dancehall singer Tenor Saw’s Ring The Alarm, a sign that this insular band was beginning to look outside itself for inspiration.

Combination Lock maintains In On The Kill Taker’s pattern of a palette-cleansing instrumental halfway through the record before Joe Lally sings lead vocals for the first time on By You, a simmering feedback meltdown that collapses in on itself with a minute of pure noise that feels like the only possible conclusion.

Target is a cutting comment on the sudden interest major labels took in noisy guitar bands in the mid 90s, set to one of the most immediate bass riffs the band had produced since Waiting Room, while the fierce stomp of Back to Base and Downed City hint at the band member’s hardcore roots.

The bassline from final song Long Distance Runner shows up as the basis of spooky unschooled clarinet jam Version, while Downed City briefly resorts to the opening clump that began the record.

Such running motifs and a killer sequencing job make Red Medicine feel like a coherent, thoughtful statement. It’s not Fugazi’s most consistent record, but it’s one of their most durable and rewarding.

Their next would trim some of its extremes while finding vast new spaces to play around in.