Fugazi: Red Medicine (Dischord) ***½
Mark Kemp, Rolling Stone, 13 July 1995
FUGAZI HAVE never been quite as one-dimensional as their critics would have it. On their first full-length album, 1990's Repeater, the D.C. quartet reinvented the sound of American hardcore. They wailed their emotionally charged political diatribes in between sturdy, lurching rhythms, Zeppelin-style changes in tempo and dynamics, and dissonant, distorted guitar textures. Even so, for noncultists, the group's defiantly anti-corporate preachiness often overshadowed the music; think Fugazi and you think ideology more than rocking out.
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