ST. LOUIS – Hyperpop icons 100 gecs shook local coffee shop The Brewstory to its foundations with an intimate acoustic show that seemed to defy all known laws of sound, newly-deafened sources confirmed.
“I thought seeing an unplugged Gecs show would be a low-stress way to make me seem cool, but now I guess my hearing is trashed forever?” whimpered local 38-year-old Mark Disley, wiping a trickle of blood from his ear. “They came out with acoustic guitars, no mics, and some Rube Goldberg-looking assortment of weird objects that I guess was their effects rack, and within seconds I was pinned to the back of the room with the sheer volume. Half the crowd staggered out after two songs, and the other half, who were all, like, 17-year-olds, rolled their eyes at us and called us ‘little piss-babies’.”
Laura Les, one half of the paradigm-shifting duo, explained their approach for the show at The Brewstory.
“Yeah, we thought it’d be nice to take it down a notch from our usual shows, create more of a chill vibe,” said Les while hitting a cotton-candy-flavored vape. “But we still wanted it to slap, so we just put together a pretty basic acoustic signal chain. We aim the guitars into the horn of a haunted gramophone, then run the sound through the plumbing of the coffee shop, do parallel compression through 16 on-fire bassoons, and resonate it in the carcass of a sperm whale. Comes out at about 120 decibels, which is barely louder than a small jumbo jet. Pretty mellow, really.”
Audiologist Dr. Joyce Amoako offered her scientific opinion on the show.
“I’ve studied sound and hearing for 40 years, and I’m completely stumped,” said Amoako. “Hearing damage on this scale should not be possible from an entirely unamplified performance in such a small, intimate setting. A survivor of this incident told me he saw one of the so-called ‘musicians’ pluck a 40 Hz sine wave out of the air, perform a manual linear fold on it, then thread it through the ears of a man in the front row like floss. These are sick, dangerous individuals.”
At press time, the band were seen diligently sweeping up the smashed panes of glass that they had used for all their snare hits.
Coming hot off the heels of their edgy, middle-finger-to-the-priest debut EP Opiate, Undertow sounds more like a pissed-off Soundgarden than the holier-than-thou musical mathematicians we know today. Check those sick drop-d riffs and slightly esoteric lyrical themes, though – they hit the ground running. Still, if you’re looking to “spiral out,” as the kids say, this isn’t the best place to start.
This is what people who don’t like Tool think Tool sounds like. The six “main” tracks all run over ten minutes. You get the sense that the shortest of these, the 10:05 “Culling Voices,” was carefully dragged out just to get it over 9:59. The interludes are just ridiculous – they can’t even let their strongest asset, drummer Danny Carey, rip without including an incredibly irritating synthesizer on “Chocolate Chip Trip.” We haven’t even gotten to the level of pretension required to name a song “Pneuma.” This thing wasn’t worth waiting for thirteen months – let alone thirteen years.
Ah, now we’re getting into the hotly-contested top three. With a catalog this small, Tool’s fourth album is equally argued as being one of their best and one of their worst. We ranked it exactly in the middle so as not to piss any Tool diehard off, but some stellar moments are on this thing. The emotional climaxes of the title track and “Rosetta Stoned,” the former teary-eyed and the latter tongue-in-cheek, both work. Experiencing the pair might clue you in as to why so many fans of this band willingly walk around with a shirt bearing generic insult meaning ‘douche.’
With muddy, hard-hitting production and songs dealing with everything from hookers with penises to musings on the psychological theories brought forth by the late Carl Jung, this is the reason why Tool fans are so fanatical about this band. It’s annoying to type out the title on an American keyboard, but [ed. note…*sigh* ctrl+c, ctrl+v] Ænima is a bonafide classic.
Cries of “spiral out, bro!” notwithstanding, this album is worthy of at least some of the Reddit-honed comparisons to The Dark Side of the Moon that it’s been gifted. From that earth-shattering scream in “The Grudge” to the final jam that is “Triad,” Lateralus is a phenomenal record if viewed in a vacuum devoid of vape clouds and ear gauges. Apart from the last track…
Many fans will argue that the rawness of this record puts it at the top of the list, while more discerning fans will tell you that it sounds terrible and the songs are underwhelming. Even the kid on the cover appears to be wondering where the band’s intensity went. I am well aware that this album is sacred to a lot of readers, but before you come at me in the comments section, please note that Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto have both admitted that it is not a good record. They should know, too, since they made the damn thing themselves, sans producer. Much of the experimentation on “Steady Diet of Nothing” was executed with greater success on their future releases, so let’s just move on.
Somehow “Red Medicine” is Fugazi’s most commercially successful album, which demonstrates how meaningless such a signifier can be. While some of the band’s best work is featured in this collection, the classics are often overshadowed or otherwise interrupted by lengthy and disjointed instrumentals. The resulting slog is not worth the highlights offered here.
“13 Songs” is actually a compilation of the band’s first two EPs and because of this we can’t in good conscience include it in the official rankings. We got a cryptic postcard from Ian himself saying “don’t you dare include this in your childish rankings.” As a standalone album, “13 Songs” is a near perfect collection. Pretty impressive considering that Guy wasn’t even really playing guitar in the band yet. Regardless, when compared with the entire discography, this record is a bit stale, no matter how fucking great “Waiting Room” is.
Ian decided to let Guy start playing guitar on this album. It was a failed attempt to curb his disruptive stage antics. Sonically, however, the results were mostly successful. The band enlisted not one, but two producers for this one. Unfortunately, neither of them could produce a lozenge for Guy. To make matters worse, the angular guitars on this one would later be cited to have heavily influenced insufferable bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Rapture. For this unforgivable reason alone, we have no choice but to rank this one a bit lower.
On “End Hits”, Fugazi’s penchant for ambience starts to fully coalesce with their penchant for absolutely tearing shit up. Hell, even bassist Joe Lally decided to sing his contributions at an audible volume for this one! Still, Ian makes us sit through four minutes of the barely listenable “Pink Frosty” before getting to Guy’s fiery closer, “F/D”
This album is so streamlined and crisp that if you told me it was released this year, I might believe you. Fresh out of the creative slump that birthed “Steady Diet of Nothing”, “In on the Kill Taker” finds the band playing at peak precision. It also finds Guy finally shaking his four-year cold to deliver some of the finest vocals of his entire career. All involved were ready to obliterate the preceding album with an absolute shit-kicker of a record.
Anybody who tells you that they don’t like “The Argument” is likely the same type of person who will look you dead in the eyes and say the Beatles weren’t a good band; both opinions are incorrect and only uttered to manufacture a false sense of hip contrarianism. Every single moment on this album is perfect. Any aspect of Fugazi’s earlier work that sounded overwrought or unfinished is finely tuned here like a Master’s thesis attempting to save a rocky final semester. Fugazi ultimately decided to drop out after this, and why the fuck not?
