Fugazi
Red Medicine

THE REVIEW

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.