Customer Reviews

End Hits

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I guess this is a punk album, but it is one of those rare albums that doesn't deserve a category. It is simply excellent music. Some albums have a definite emotion they draw from the listener. This one is too complex to label with just one. There are parts of this album that make you stop whatever you are doing and just listen. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE A PUNK FAN TO LOVE THIS ALBUM.

I love Fugazi. Red Medicine - the album where Fugazi started branching out and slowing down - initially was the most off-putting thing I'd ever heard, but now I love it. End Hits, its followup is now one of my favorite records.

I admire the band's early classics like "Repeater," "Waiting Room," "Merchandise," "Nice New Outfit" or "Margin Walker," but this record tops those excellent punk numbers by moving on from deliberate abrasion.

"In On the Kill Taker" had the band tinkering out with complex rhythms and structures, but often they couldn't break free of feedback-and-screaming while doing so. This CD throws all that out the window - "Floating Boy" is pure dub, "Five Corporations" is the only punk song in 7:4 time I've ever heard, "Break" and "Recap Modotti" are downright funky.

Of course, the lyrics are always superb (especially the anti-borders Jeremiad "Place Position") and Fugazi's performances have finally caught up completely with their songwriting. Buy this awesome album!

Fugazi, along with NoMeansNo, are pretty much the only innovative "punk" bands left in the music world today. Whereas once punk was eclectic & vibrant, it has now become a cartoon, loaded with Bad Religion and Green Day sound-alikes. Amazingly, Fugazi have completely transformed their sound and still been able to remain interesting. Gone are the dub-style bass lines, the amped-up funk drumming and the choppy power riffs. This would be the death knell for most groups, but Fugazi get away with it. Instead, I now hear a band that injects artiness and experimentation into their rock-out jams, as well as exploring their more ambient, spacious sound. "Break" is a classic Fugazi album opener, displaying a tightness that only comes with years of playing together. "Foreman's Dog" starts off with some classic rock riff, but quickly delves into a mid-pace display of tricky guitar lines. It also features the best example of their contrasting dual vocal stylings. Guy Piccioto has a sinister, minor-key delivery and a lyrical obsession with body parts, while Ian MacKaye delivers anthemic choruses and themes in his sing-songy yelp. Their songs are deceptively simple. The band aren't the greatest musicians, but have the inventiveness to take their limited abilities and combine all these simple elements into unique compositions filled with time changes and unusual chord progressions. The instrumental "Arpeggiator" sounds like it should be the theme to the Charge of the Light Brigade, it has a familiar feeling to it, like you've heard it before in a classical music piece. "Recap Modotti" is a laid-back, moody number that could easily be used in a movie somewhere, featuring bassist Joe Lally on lead vox. The band is light years ahead of any of their contemporaries. Even their fans have to catch up to the band's constant, gradual style transitions. "Guilford Fall" utilizes feedback and droning one-note chords, but somehow remains catchy as hell. Granted, songs like "Floating Boy" & "Pink Frosty" go nowhere, but as long as Fugazi keep one-upping themselves, even the lacklustre tunes become bearable. I'm totally not into their personal politics, but they are to be admired for doing whatever they feel like, fans and foes be damned. It's as if they knew that they'd eventually lose a large chunk of their fan base whether they sold out or not, and decided to at least amuse themselves. They've gone from rhythm-driven crowd-pleasers to more guitar and vocal based aural soundscapes. The rhythm section is more subdued but still very involved, ocassionally breaking into their well-worn, but still fun, formula (see "Five Corporations"). "End Hits" & "Red Medicine" are worlds apart from their debut ep's & "Repeater", and the end results of this evolution have been staggering. It's almost like one great band has split into 2 amazing bands. Fugazi are an awesome group that have been criminally ignored, due to their refusal to affiliate with corporate-driven labels and radio/video stations. Instead of taking the money and running, they've stuck to their guns and become an important piece of musical history. Give them a chance. It'll take a few listens, but when they grow on you, they are a pleasant surprise in the copycat music world.

People give Fugazi heat for musically straying from punk convention. You know what? Those people are probably the same morons who, like the hesher interviewed in the film "Instrument," like to recall Ian's glory days in Black Flag, whilst pronouncing his name wrong. Fugazi fly their middle-finger flag, not only to the music industry, but also to the idiots who think anything that strays from the four chords at 200 beats-per-minute hardcore "isn't punk rock, dude." (note: these are the same people who have never even heard of the Minutemen or Big Black or Suicide). This album shows Fugazi at their best: when they're not afraid to stray from the hardcore they helped pioneer. In fact, "Five Corporations" and "Place Position" are the only heavy Fugazi-style rockers here. Yeah, it's no "Repeater," but thank god that someone's figured out how to establish musical tension without their veins sticking out of their necks, and is able to do so without being horribly repetitive or boring. To my fellow post-punk enthusiasts: enjoy! To all the "punk rock" morons: there are plenty of hardcore bands that haven't changed their sound since 1983. Go take off your shirts and violently mangle your sweaty friends in the pit, and let my friends and I enjoy "End Hits" in peace.

Fugazi's End Hits is truly one of the best albums of all time, only to be trumped by another Fugazi album if you're already a fan. With Fugazi it's really listeners choice, in my opinion every album is a classic. To a new comer this album will grow on you like a weed. A beautiful, hard hitting, guitar smashing, bass pumping, lyrically ambigous weed. Cause that's End Hits.

Hits: Break, Five Corporations, Coustic Acrostic, oh who am i kidding the whole thing rocks.

Many albums I buy sound good the first time, but then get boring after a few rounds. In the case of End Hits, I was hoping for something like Red Medicine and earlier Fugazi, but got hit with something new. I sat down and listened to the entire album front to back - and didn't really like it. But, I did it again in a couple days and found that I could make sense of the abstractions that I couldn't understand previously. A few weeks later and I LOVED this album. Everything made sense. It was like learning a new language of music.

This is an album you will never get sick of if you give it the time it deserves. My congratulations to the band for a job well done.

The problem with picking a favorate album by Fuguzi is that each time you listen to one of their records, it BECOMES your favorate. "Kill Taker" is probably the quintessenal Fuguzi album: it fuses their blasting punk with their brilliant experments, with amazing results.

But End Hits is more suited to my taste. The band is loud as ever, but they remind me just as much of Captian Beefheart as they do Minor Threat here. They use hardcore textures, but only as a framework to play with layered guitars, shiffting time signatures, creepy vocal experments, and wierd electrtonic utterances. They are constantly locking together for insane rhtyms, scraping amazingly controlled feedback out of their amps and mics, and adding codas to songs when you least expect them. It is like walking a dark house and having monsters pop out when you are off gaurd. This is art rock painted on a hardcore canvas.

This band also REALLY knows how to use a studio. They have this knack for making increadibly layered, intercate music, while allowing it to sound live and spontainious. They must spend hours getting all the amps and microphones in just the right place, to get just the right depth. The result is that even their off the cuff noises are as rich as other bands layered overdubs.

The music is frightening, dark, thick and completely uncommerical. All the songs are fully realized, and the experments always work. The intensity never lets up but there are musical surprises everywhere. To be honest, you have probably not heard much like this. I sure as hell haven't.

Strongly Reccomended.

If Fugazi has become the living embodiment of the term "independent," then the band members' musical growth seems to have been equally unaffected by contemporary movements launched outside of their hometown, practically to the point where "Fugazi" and the "Washington, D.C., sound" are interchangeable. (Although the band members might disagree.) It's consistently amazing to hear them pass through areas of angular post-punk, dub, hardcore and rock while remaining separate from all of the above; and on "End Hits," Fugazi continue to move forward as their own genre. From the abruptly clipped opening track onward, "End Hits" is a demanding, slow-burning, almost cinematic listen -- production-wise, it's certainly the richest "headphone record" in the band's history. Sound effects, programmed beats ("Closed Captioned"), wah pedals ("Guilford Fall"), tambourines ("Five Corporations"), vocal treatments ("No Surprise") and layers of overdubs snake through these 13 tracks, each alight with a sense of purpose and an understanding of both economy and contrast. The noted Fugazi sense of urgency remains in tracks such as "Place Position" and the fittingly titled instrumental "Arpeggiator," but it's tempered by tortoise-like development. (After all, with age, one realizes the importance of contemplating an idea rather than merely screaming one's lungs out.) Guy Picciotto's and Ian MacKaye's lyrics are as open-ended as ever; and while it might seem logical to assume that a song such as "Closed Captioned" is pointed at the media ("And since we live in present tense/The only hope of making sense/All depends on the source of light"), it's not cut-and-dry here. Same goes for the title: "End Hits" could be a statement against the music industry's widget-production system, an indication that this is Fugazi's swan song, or a bullet fired at the image of the rock star and the media that've propagated it. All are equally relevant to a band who've spent a career questioning their own place in an industry they simultaneously embrace and disregard.

I don't listen to Fugazi much but when I do I put in newer Fugazi, because in my opinion it is much more creative and interesting than their older stuff. End Hits has countless magical moments and nicely crafted songs, so I'd say it's my favorite Fugazi disc. Be sure to check out "No Surprise" and "Arpeggiator".

This album is just as addictive as the rest - once I figured it out. In another entry posted here, Geri/ketivtech from California talked about how at first listen, he didn't like this CD. But after a few days of listening "figured out" what the band was doing. I have experienced the same and believe that anyone who would give this band a chance would become a fan. Since the release of End Hits, my Fugazi collection has been resurrected (again) and has taken over my 6 disc changer. I am along for the ride!