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Rating: Someone has called it the turning point album, the record with which Fugazi definitively distances themselves from their original hardcore roots to reach something else. One thing is certain, Red Medicine is one of those few albums in rock history that exists outside of definitions, immortal and atypical, original and transcendent.
The music speaks for itself: the opener Do You Like Me is almost misleading in its (relative) "normality," but from Bed for the Scraping onwards, with its beautiful crazy guitar riff midway between Punk/noise/psychedelia, you enter a mad and deviant vortex where the law is the absence of schemes and dogmas trapping the music; Latest Disgrace, Birthday Pony, Forensic Scene, are kind of disturbed ballads that seem to come from another world, visionary and apocalyptic; Combination Lock and Version are noisy instrumentals that speak of a crazy world; Fell, Destroyed is perhaps the pinnacle of the aesthetic proposed in Red Medicine: a piece out of time and space, indefinable yet perfectly complete; Target and especially Back to Base recall Fugazi's near and distant past; Long Distance Runner, with its hypnotic tail, is the perfect conclusion.
Red Medicine is an album so out of focus that it might be the least influential of Fugazi's works; yet it manages to achieve at the same time a formal perfection and a stylistic divergence such that the music reaches an absolute and almost metaphysical dimension that is more unique than rare in Rock. Essential.
Tracklist Lyrics and Videos
02 Bed for the Scraping (02:50)
I'm sick with this
I'm sick with this
situation avoided or just missed?
my own sweet time says it's ten twenty four
hardly recognise simple things anymore
I don't wanna be defeated
I don't wanna be defeated
I don't wanna be defeated
I don't wanna be defeated
this is the point
this is the manifest
bed for the scraping
dirty little secret
reason for the gathering
consequence
what else is there to do but go
this is the point
this is the manifest
bed for the scraping
dirty little secret
reason for the gathering
consequence
what else is there to do
what else is there to do
but go outside
look around
look around
04 Birthday Pony (03:08)
This is a birthday pony
This is a strange kind of rest
Because i feel like a guest when I'm right here at home
I'm not right here at home
I opened up these accounts
All these separate accounts
Because I can't comprehend the single ride to the end
I needed something to do and so I split into two
But now the pattern takes hold
I find I'm losing control
Laugh boy
I don't want to be free
This is a birthday pony
05 Forensic Scene (03:05)
In your memory not so gentle
Perversify slash sentimental
Caught between and caught without
I'm a failure not your failure now
In and out just like a knife would tax the flesh and leave a cheap wound
Fucked and fucking love and lay
Congenitally fractured anyway
Unclipped unclean this forensic scene's all played out
The defense rests and sorry's just a no shit sherlock mouth talk con job
From your memory to this instant worked so hard for working distance
Like a mouth too late to shut
I'm a failure not your failure now
07 Fell, Destroyed (03:46)
Here's a list of side effects
Practice tested
Covering every malice angle
For example you will sleep forever
You will never sleep again
Yawn to yawn your face is born to mask the shade of shit you're in
Now it's time to fake resignment room assignment
Next door to the generator
What the fuck it is
Whatever powers lights to burn all night
Your teeth to grind to grind so fine
You'll find out sooner what it is
To ring the alarm or you're sold to dying
Fell, destroyed and long out used step into it
Green in laying water blue
Cop a feeling coprophagics
Say next in line well how about you
Freedom's fiction sorry fifteen time to sell the softer shoe
Ring the alarm or you're sold to dying
(respects to tenor saw)
10 Target (03:32)
It's cold outside and my hands are dry
Skin is cracked and I realize
That I hate the sound of guitars
A thousand grudging young millionaires
Forcing silence sucking sound
Forced into this conversation
So i say shine let their planets collide
This is the darkening down of my mind
We could be making it oiling like crime
We could be making it staking last dimes
If you want to sieze the sound you don't need a reservation
The torch is passed it's yours to return
Lay at their feet now use it to burn
For marketing the use of the word generation
A false alliance of money persuading
Forcing silence sound sucking
Forced into this conversation
Now if you want to sieze the sound you don't need a reservation
So open so young so target I can smell your heart you're a target
11 Back to Base (01:45)
autonomy is a world of difference they're creeping round but they know they can't come in back from the front with observation it's still there across from me an extreme example bringing you what they want twenty four hours a day whole lot of not but it's convenient pray for fire they'll tell you anything it's speculation pure speculation bringing you back to base
12 Downed City (02:53)
I want to go
I want to get out
All guns are loaded
And have gone off now
I'm channeling 17 dead revolutions
That have long gave up the ghost
One drink of water and I'm drowning
The space between the dime and the dollar
The space between the city and the suburb
Some kid took another kid
Pumped him full of holes
Just to see a new horizon
One drink of water and i'm drowning in it
Not alright
Downed city downed city
Two and two sawed in two
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