Fugazi Medicine

I've been concentrating on getting all of the new 2025 releases up on the blog before the year's end, but after seeing the Fugazi post from Marcus the other day, I figured that I'd pull one of their records from the pile and work that into the mix.

Back in the day, I guess I considered Red Medicine to be the end of Fugazi's run of great albums. I enjoyed it at the time, but there were songs where the band was pushing themselves out of my comfort zone. I could hang with the album, but by the time End Hits came around it was too much for me and I bailed on the band. Over the years, I kind of lumped Red Medicine in with End Hits, often times confusing the two, and I've spent the last 20+ years largely ignoring it.

Earlier this year I was influenced to check out The Argument, and I loved it so much that I started to think that maybe I should revisit some of those Fugazi records that I didn't really care for the first time around.

I dug out Red Medicine to check out the songs and while I can definitely hear what turned me off back in 1995, after spending a lot of time with bands like Karate and Modest Mouse the last couple of years, I can appreciate the different textures that Fugazi was playing with on this record. I listened to it quite a bit at the end of summer and through the Fall, and obviously needed to add it to the collection. These colored vinyl pressings look so nice, and it makes me want to replace all of my black vinyl versions.