Fugazi
End Hits

THE REVIEW

Immense.
Listening to it daily, with the attention owed to the suspicion that you have something great in your hands, you realize that the album indeed contains an infinity of nuances, a multitude of ideas, sounds, and different atmospheres, making it different each time, reinterpretative, replayable, and incredibly human, alive—a record made of flesh that feeds on primordial instincts.

End Hits is the definitive Fugazi album, the one that makes you think "it couldn't get better than this; now they should disband and let others reckon with their work."
The review is a challenge; I dive in, certain that criticisms won't be lacking. After all, the difference between a good album and a "boundary line" like End Hits is that, as mentioned, everyone mediates the raw sound with their life, their experiences, and sees in it what they feel, making a review merely a minor opinion.

I hear talk of punk, and I just wouldn't say so. Maybe it's because after Zen Arcade, the word punk means little to me, but for Fugazi, the aesthetic and purpose are different; they navigate between genres while remaining unmistakable.
Amusing: I consider it the greatest post-hardcore album I've ever heard, and three-quarters of the album isn't post-hardcore.

Fugazi are perpetually angry with the rest of the world, they scream against everything and everyone, yet remain credible, unlike other more renowned bands, and incredibly pragmatic ('instead we stand over the dead the vultures all well fed killer running free', how true and how terrible it is to hear it said).
Musically, it is continuous experimentation: MacKaye's wonderful guitar launches into continuous arabesques, screams, creations, but also the rhythm section, human and powerful, like the voice of a never-so-in-shape Picciotto, tormented and tormenting, give the album a wonderful and above all new, fresh architecture that screams the group's personality.

They are legend; if I had six, I’d give six; if I had seven, I’d give seven, but I have five, and I give five.