Throwing copper

Fugazi and Shellac are good conductors

by Carly Carioli

Fugazi

The two figures most clearly identified as staunch defenders of the independent-rock faith have new albums out: Fugazi are back with End Hits (Discord), and Shellac's Terraform (Touch & Go) is now out on CD, a respectful couple of months after its release on vinyl. They're both pretty good. I'm feeling a bit distanced from 'em, though, because instead of my wandering into a record store, finding a new Fugazi album miraculously in the bins, dropping everything else, and plopping down a measly nine bucks, our office actually got a freebie from Discord. Shoot me now, I'm goin' to rock-crit heaven. On the other hand, the latest one-liner from the Henny Youngman of punk, Steve Albini, has put Terraform on the shelves at the same price for both vinyl and CD. Instead of lowering the CD cost, though, he upped the price of the vinyl to 14 bucks.

Half the reason I keep picking up Fugazi albums is that I'm still waiting for some prodigal return to "Waiting Room" form. And since they're determined not to do that, they've become kind of a pain in the ass -- making albums that are too diffuse and smart to ignore completely, but with only one or two memorable songs. The best thing about Fugazi since 1991's Steady Diet of Nothing has been their ability, as they've steamed steadily out of post-punk's harbor for the open seas of prog-rock, to sound neither quite as lost at sea as the post-Slint art-school meanderings of June of '44 nor as repetitive as the Jawbox prog-pop cabal who took Fugazi's Repeater for a ride the way folks once cruised on Revolver. You get the sense listening to End Hits that Fugazi are headed, well, somewhere. But only occasionally do you ever feel that they've arrived.

Of course, the sound of the early Fugazi was appropriated for the grand-scale youth-culture hoodwinking that was alternative rock. So, with their own ports fished out from under them, Fugazi have had to move on. Which may be one reason End Hits is awash in themes of detachment and rootlessness, isolation and dislocation. Where singer Guy Picciotto used to lace his American-history lessons with calls for a redress of grievances, on the new "Place Position" he's concerned more with a numbing anonymity: "All origins are accidental/You've got no papers and no roads lead home anymore." Singer/guitarist Ian MacKaye sounds most at home leading the charge against corporate consolidation on the searing "Five Corporations," but he seems more concerned with the fragmentation and compartmentalization of modern life that corporate consolidation portends. "We take apart/Everything we build," he almost whispers on the opening track (which starts out like "Waiting Room" but, as is characteristic of latter-day Fugazi, turns quieter instead of louder).

Steve Albini has proved himself a completely different kind of pain in the ass, but a more rewarding one. For all his acerbic proselytizing and acidic wit, Shellac are basically a hard-rock outfit that's been stripped to its skivvies and given a good horsewhipping. It's hard rock that subverts the hard-rock high life, with Albini standing for the introverted, mundane guy with arcane, semi-obsessional fixations, occasionally doling out threats so thickly veiled and tangential that they're practically comical, the skinny geek outsmarting the bully with taunts that go over the bum's head.

Given any other guitarist/lyricist, Shellac's taut rhythm section (drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston) would probably suffer more Zeppelin comparisons. They play straight men to Albini's spastic, chirpy guitar -- an instrument that in his hands takes on the essence of awkwardness and violence, a guitar played as if it were a rabid turkey that he's been assigned to subdue and that's fighting him all the way. Terraform chops up its impossibly tight, concise grooves with long, languid breaks drawn out to random and sometimes ridiculous lengths, like a cinematographer whose camera lingers on a couch long after the principals have left the room. The first track, "Don't We Deserve a Look at You the Way You Really Are," takes on the marathon monotony of a staring match -- building a sparse, remarkably solid groove into a 12-minute exercise in endurance, as minutes go by with only a two-note bass pattern and a repetitive, jarring beat to pass the time.

Despite this inauspicious start, Terraform is pretty brilliant. Albini screams louder, makes funnier jokes (on "House Full of Garbage," the story of a guy who builds a mountain of garbage in his living room, he shouts, "Imagine his wife/Asleep in their bed/The times they make love/With the doo-doo and the feces on the wall!"), and even takes a stab at singing. "Copper," the last song, clocks in under two minutes, and it sounds like, well, a four-chord pop song, or as close as Shellac are ever likely to get to one -- a poignant and hilarious little-engine-that-could allegory about copper. Like copper, Shellac and Fugazi "will never be gold," as the chorus goes, but they're good little conductors, and they'll do in a pinch.