Wugazi - '13 Chambers'

Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothing to fuck with, but I was still pretty excited at the prospect of Wugazi, a mash-up of the clan and D.C. post-hardcore legends Fugazi, courtesy of DJs Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. By using Fugazi instrumentals as the building blocks for Clan cuts, the curiosity comes off as something akin to Danger Mouse’s Grey Album, which blended Jay-Z and The Beatles. While 13 Chambers definitely serves hip-hop heads more than it will hardcore fans, the result is undeniably worth at least one listen.

13 Chambers reveals what Fugazi probably knew all along: For all the noise, their songs had a lot of groove to them. While Otter and Andy certainly concoct a lot of original beats out of the music, the moments that are the most surprising are the least remixed. “Nowhere to Wait,” for example, directly imports the intro from Fugazi’s most popular tune, “Waiting Room,” and lets the rhymes float right over that amazing beat. Still, the duo deserves credit for splicing so much new material from old.

That said, I felt a little disappointed after listening. Only the most devoted Fugazi fans are going to recognize every riff, and many of the beats don’t necessarily require ’gazi samples. Furthermore, while all the live instrumentation aids the material, the result is not quite the otherwordly mash-up of Grey Album. Rather, it just sounds like a rap group with a live band, namely The Roots.

Not that I’m trying to dump on Wugazi. I think it’s a clever idea with a cute name. And some of the tunes, like “Another Chessboxin’ Argument,” are downright infectious. But taken as a whole, 13 Chambers is little more than a novelty item, and while I’m happy to have spent the day spinning it, I’m also happy that I didn’t have to pay for it.

Vinyl Vednesday 2/16/2011

[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick measuring contest, but it usually turns out that way. I just got back from a business trip to D.C., so all of the picks this week come from Washington/Virginia. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]

Records: Cloak/Dagger’s “Kamikazes” seven-inch (2007) on black, Fugazi’s Steady Diet of Nothing (1991) on black, and Strike Anywhere’s Iron Front EP (2009) on clear green.

Place of Purchase: Cloak/Dagger came from Smash Records in D.C. Fugazi was a Repo purchase. Strike Anywhere was ordered directly from Bridge Nine Records.

Thoughts: Even though I only had 24 hours to conduct business in D.C., I still found time to hit up a record store. I picked Smash Records since it was only a few blocks from my hotel (Later I found even more stores nearby. Clearly I need to investigate). One of my picks was this seven-inch from Cloak/Dagger. The A-side, “Kamikaze,” comes from the band’s Jade Tree debut, We Are. The B-side, “She Cracked,” is just as good. Both tunes are very much in the Black Flag/Stooges vein, which has always been C/D’s strength. Not that I’m trying to be hyperbolic, but these tunes sum up rock ‘n’ roll’s entire history.

Any post about music from D.C. needs to mention Ian MacKaye. So here you go. A Steady Diet of Nothing took me a little longer to get into than 13 Songs or Repeater, if only because it’s a little bit slower and more dissonant. But it’s still Fugazi –post-hardcore starts here. MacKaye’s song “Reclamation” always stayed with me: “There are our demands / We want control of your bodies / Decisions will now be ours / You carry out your noble actions / We will carry our noble scars.” Mix those words with shredding guitar.

Good God I listened to so much Strike Anywhere yesterday. The one thing I was missing, though, was Iron Front EP, a collection of two songs from the band’s last full-length of the same name and two left off. All four rock face hard. What I loved about Strike Anywhere is two-fold. 1). Their songs are so fast and melodic and loud. Frontman Thomas Barnett sings every line with the utmost urgency and sincerity. 2). No matter how bad the world seems in the band’s songs, there’s always a tinge of hope for a better tomorrow.

Vinyl Vednesday 5/26/2010

[Vinyl Vednesday is a weekly feature about three favorite vinyl finds. It’s not meant to be a dick-measuring contest, but it usually turns out that way. E-mail pelonej1@gmail.com with your own big finds!]

Records: The Beatles’ “White Album” (1968) on black, Fugazi’s Repeater (1990) on black, and Portishead’s Third (2008) on black.

Place of Purchase: I inherited the “White Album” from my mother (notice her maiden name, Ferris, is written in the top right corner of the cover), while the ’Gazi ‘n’ P-Heads came from Hot Topic.

Thoughts: The “White Album” has almost always been my favorite Beatles album. Maybe it’s because it’s the only Beatles studio album my parents owned when I was a kid (the rest of their collection consisted of the red and blue singles compilations). Maybe it’s because it’s the first Beatles album I ever owned on CD (first rock album in general, for that matter). Or maybe it’s because of the album’s sprawling double disc format. As much as I love Rubber Soul and Revolver, they’re much easier to explore and live in. “White Album” still drops the occasional new doorway to me. And it’s packed with my favorite Beatles tunes: “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Julia,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.”, “Dear Prudence”… and that’s just the first record. I haven’t even gotten to “Helter Skelter” or the “Revolution” tunes. For the best evidence that this album rules, let’s see how many people point out that I haven’t even mentioned “Blackbird” yet.

Also it has the best Ringo tune (“Don’t Pass Me By”), which I would take over “Yellow Submarine,” “Act Naturally,” or, uh, “Octopus’s Garden” any day.

Totally switching gears, let’s talk about Fugazi. I like Fugazi a whole dang lot, and Repeater remains one of my favorites from them. I love it so much that I stopped writing about it for the last like 30 minutes and just listened to the tunes. In my world, these are the biggest hits of 1990: “Reprovisional,” with its deliberate, punchy rhythm, “Blueprint,” because it’s just as much of a slow burn, and “Repeater,” because it’s totally hardcore, drenched in feedback, and pissed off about the job market (sounds like me ‘n’ my friends) but features such an insanely catchy guitar line. Tons of bands have tried to incorporate pop elements into hardcore music and failed. Apparently they just need to rip off Fugazi, ’cause those dudes pulled this shit off 20 years ago. BRING FUGAZI BACK TO LIFE.

I’ve got two stories about Portishead’s Third. It was the album that got me into them. A lot of my friends were obsessed their plaintive trip-hop sounds, but I couldn’t get passed all of the DJ scratching, which I found to be gimmicky. Apparently, the band felt the same way, as Third manages to fulfill everything Portishead’s could want while sidestepping trip-hop clichés. And it sometimes it even sounds like the music from Terminator! Hells yeah!

But not everything about Portishead is great. Their record label, Mercury Records, is run by wieners who don’t support digital downloads. I bought the album on vinyl about four months after it was released, by which time the label had already stopped honoring the download codes included. What I find bitterly funny about this is that most indie labels (No Idea!, Dirtnap, etc.) honor those codes for years. DICKS! Dicks forever! I’m still bitter about this two years later.

But Third is still pretty great.