Fugazi - In on the Kill Taker (Albini demos)
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Others have written on these demos, but I'll revisit them since yesterday's mixtape had a tune from In on the Kill Taker. Fugazi were somewhat creatures of habit. They jammed at Ian MacKaye's grandparents' house in Guilford, CT; they recorded at Don Zientara's Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, VA (interesting how the various Fugazi albums recorded there sound so unlike).
For their third full-length, they tried something different and recorded demos in Chicago with Steve Albini. Band renowned for live chemistry + engineer renowned for live-sounding recordings = match made in heaven, right? Not exactly. Neither band nor engineer was happy with the results, and Fugazi returned to Inner Ear to record their most aggressive album.
Fugazi - In on the Kill Taker (Albini demos) [23.2MB .zip]
In an interview, MacKaye said that these sessions never saw daylight. However, MP3's labeled as such have floated around the Internet. I don't know if they're the real deal, as (a) the MP3's are encoded at an abysmally low 160 kbps, and (b) evidently the band also did previous demos at the Guilford house.
But I'd believe that Albini did these demos. The ambience and snare sound seem like they could come from him. Albini has always claimed not to have a sound, only capturing bands as they are. But while his mind may be objective, his hands must be subjective. He has to make choices regarding what sounds best to him. Thus, he's probably prone to tendencies. The sturdiness here is quite Albini-esque.
Public Witness Program (Albini demo)Public Witness Program (final version)
Origin aside, these demos are interesting as such. At this second round of demoing, the songs were pretty much set. But they still had fascinating work-in-progress differences from the final products. "23 Beats Off" didn't have a long noisefest of an ending; "Public Witness Program" didn't have handclaps, which to me is 50% of the song.
These differences aren't as huge as, say, those between the demos and final tracks of Jimmy Eat World's Futures (all of which are on that record's 2-CD edition, which I highly recommend; it is amazing to hear ugly (and I mean ugly) duckling demos turned into pop perfection). But they're meaningful. For a band as seemingly spontaneous as Fugazi, these demos show that every vocal "ad lib" and string scrape was not only planned, but also finely tuned.
Labels: clee, rock, self-released
8 Comments:
Innnnnnteresting... never heard these demos.
Thanks for these! I had no idea they existed.
For a band as seemingly spontaneous as Fugazi, these demos show that every vocal "ad lib" and string scrape was not only planned, but also finely tuned.
This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's seen Fugazi play live. Pretty much every time I've seen them play (and I lost count some time in the 90s, and also own (and have heard) the entire Fugazi Live Series), they've nearly effortlessly pulled off all the complicated little noisy parts and drum fills (and bell hits) pretty much exactly how they are on the album. They can change the feel of a song and change its shape drastically – I've always thought of them as being a jazz ensemble, essentially – but it's always under their control.
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Sorry that was me above, the computer was logged in as my brother.
Excellent entry. I don't really think that's an albini demo though, I think I get what you hear in the drums, but it just sounds like how drums sound to me on most demos. The kick is kinda lost which is something that I don't think Albini would do although he might choose an atypical kick sound for sure.
Then again, 160kbs... And the kick isn't so pronounced on the final recording either.
And yes on the handclaps!
...then again a friend far more wise in the ways of engineering heard these and said that if he had to guess just from listening, he'd say this is definitely Albini's sensibility in the way the drumset sounds, and to an extent, the overall levels, so don't listen to me, listen to him.
Forrest - I saw Fugazi once, and admittedly it was ages ago, but the main impression I took away was the long dub jams (Red Medicine tour, probably). I don't know if they were replicating the record, but the jams seemed to go on forever, in that time-stretching way that good dub has. You have all the Fugazi Live recordings??? Damn, that's a *lot*!!! Are there any that particularly stand out?
(To clarify, only have set one – I didn't know set two existed until checking Wikipedia just now.)
At one point I promised to review the whole series, but then I realized that would be insane. It's a LOT of music, and while the recording quality is highly variable, the playing is amazingly consistent. Perhaps too much so. The moments that stood out to me were the ones that typically stood out in the actual Fugazi shows I attended (I sort of lost track of how many times I saw them live some time around 10), i.e. when Guy and Ian stopped songs to berate the audience and call various crowd activities "uncool". Some of the early shows are interesting, because they have songs like "Turn Off Your Guns" and "In Defense of Humans" that never made it to actual Fugazi albums (the latter appeared on the old Dischord State of the Union compilation). Of course, those are also the roughest-sounding recordings. And the first show appears to be from before Guy joined the band, which sounds really weird.
I periodically consider compiling a highlights reel, but it's 26 1/2 hours of music to sort through and I only have so much time, you know?
Whoa, that is a lot of show-age. Reminds me of Pearl Jam's plethora of official bootlegs. The pre-Guy Fugazi shows might interest me in a morbid way. In general, I'm not too interested in non-jazz live shows, b/c, as you pointed out, the most interesting moments tend not to come from the actual music. Hell, I'm even sitting on a Fugazi bootleg disc that I've never listened to, and I love the band.
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