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.

Argument For More Fugazi

At the start of this year, Marcus posted about The Argument from Fugazi. His story sounded similar to mine, as I'd started to lose interest in Fugazi records with Red Medicine and then never really cared for End Hits... so by the time The Argument was released in 2001, I barely gave it any attention. At some point I did download it, and put it on a CDR in an attempt to try and hang with the album, but I quickly wrote it off and it ended up in the trash. My mind is more open these days and I spend most of my time lately obsessing over bands that I thought that I hated... so when I saw the post from Marcus talking about how surprised he was that he was enjoying The Argument, I thought that maybe it was time for me to give it a fair chance as well.

Look, I can completely understand why I didn't like this record in 2001. This was not nearly aggressive enough for me at the time. There are times when it was far too laid back and slow for my frantic hardcore kid energy. Listening to this in 2025, I can hear that it is still very much a Fugazi record, but there are layers and moods here that I just didn't understand or appreciate at the time. The Argument is kind of perfect for me at this time and place, and I'm tempted to check out other Fugazi recods that I haven't listened to in the past 25 years to see how I feel about them now.

This "thor" blue marbled colored vinyl looks great.

Smallpox Champion

Someone recently posted a picture of In On The Kill Taker to Instagram recently. Now, I love those first three Fugazi records, but it's been a long time since I'd paid any attention to their stuff post-Repeater.

In checking my listening stats over at last.fm, I was kind of surprised to see that over the past 10 years, I'd listened to In On The Kill Taker only once. I clearly don't pay much attention to those later albums.

While out at the record store, I saw a recent reissue of the album. Since it had been on my mind lately, and I didn't have a copy on vinyl, it seemed as though the time was right to finally add a copy to my record collection. Good album, and it was fun to finally revisit it.