Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina have a new band with an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. Their debut is a shrewd distillation of some of the United States’ most insidious issues.
It is both cruelly ironic and fitting that Fugazi bowed out after 2001’s The Argument, just as the U.S. was entering a perpetual state of war, both in the external, militaristic and ideological senses. As the unwavering moral compass of the underground—not to mention the most impassioned, inspiring, and adventurous post-hardcore band of their time—Fugazi had spent much of the late ’80s and ’90s opening our eyes to the abuses of power, income inequality, and toxic masculinity that have only seemed to become more pervasive in the 21st century. In times of crisis, we look for heroes to rally around—or even just to provide a quality protest song—but Fugazi were never interested in being those kinds of saviors. They were sharing the blueprints that exposed the fallacies of the system, but their retreat affirmed that the task of changing the world is on all of us.
And yet when, during George W. Bush’s first term, Ian MacKaye debuted the minimalist, melodic indie-rock duo the Evens with ex-Warmers drummer (and wife) Amy Farina, it felt a bit like Clark Kent opting to live as a mortal while Metropolis plunged into chaos in Superman II. Though his insights were as sharp and critical as ever, MacKaye had essentially traded in Fugazi’s bullhorn for tin cans and string, resulting in music that was more intimate and threadbare. The Evens’ low-stakes, homespun quality was further reinforced when the band was put on the backburner after the couple became parents, resulting in a six-year gap between 2006’s Get Evens and 2012’s The Odds, and mostly silence since.
Now, in the midst of the most tumultuous election year in American history, MacKaye and Farina have resurfaced with a new band featuring an old friend—Fugazi bassist Joe Lally (fresh from playing in jazz-punk power trio the Messthetics with fellow Fugazi alumnus Brendan Canty). But in terms of career aspirations, they practically make the Evens look like shameless self-promoters. Formed in 2015, the new group existed for three years as a private affair; they played their first show in 2018 before they had even settled on a name, announcing it at the bottom of a community-bulletin email from Washington, D.C. activist group Positive Force. Not surprisingly, Coriky sound like they could’ve popped up in 2003 as the logical bridge between the nimble, jazz-inflected rhythmic undercurrents and artful dissonance of latter-day Fugazi and the more congenial pop sensibilities and song-sketch scrappiness of the Evens. But if Coriky sound more emboldened and agitated than the Evens ever did, exhibiting the focus and fury the times demand, they’re less interested in addressing the current state of the nation than in probing the insidious issues and attitudes that afflict America no matter who’s sitting in the Oval Office.
As ever, MacKaye shrewdly distills macro calamities to personal, almost prosaic vignettes. “Clean Kill” takes the concept of “office drone” to its most literal extreme, indicting a modern military apparatus where triggering drone strikes halfway around the world is just another mindless desk job, complete with coffee breaks and idle chit-chat. The perverse normality of the scene is framed by an uncanny sing-along hook—“it’s a clean kill, but it’s not clean”—that captures both the callous efficiency of the gig and the mental toll exacted on the operators. “Have a Cup of Tea” zooms out to implicate the country as a whole: As the song locks into a “Suggestion”-like lurch en route to a similar conclusion (i.e., “we are all guilty”), MacKaye explains how authoritarian violence—and bourgeois indifference to it—is simply the American way: “It’s in our mind/It’s in the Constitution/It’s in our house/It’s in our hands/It’s in our eye/It’s in our blood/It’s in our DNA.”
When you hear MacKaye barking those words with jugular-popping force alongside Lally’s stalking bassline, it’s tempting to close your eyes and imagine it’s 1991 with the White House looming in the background. Coriky abounds with similar displays of Fugazi-fan catnip, like the “Give Me the Cure”-style build-up of “Inauguration Day” and the start-stop funk and frenzied guitar scraping of “Say Yes.” But as the vocal interplay on the latter song illustrates, Farina’s presence lends Coriky a personality all their own. Where MacKaye and Farina often worked in humble harmony with the Evens, her sassy and soulful performances here position her as a more mischievous foil, playfully poking holes in the patriarchy (“Too Many Husbands”) and the shocking regularity of shootings in American classrooms (“Jack Says”).
In moments like these, Coriky present chronic disappointment as a psychic survival tactic, offering odd reassurance that things have always been fucked. (On the cheeky “Hard to Explain,” MacKaye seems to equate right-wing trolls with Minor Threat stans who still resent him for abandoning hardcore dogmatism to pursue Fugazi’s open-minded experimentalism: “Your position is you want me to fix/Something that you said I broke in 1986.”) But they’re not about to let their complaints harden into complacency. Atop the doom-blues groove of “Last Thing,” Farina, MacKaye, and Lally solemnly sing in unison: “The last thing we ever wanted was a war/But we found it much too easy.” It’s the sound of D.C. punk’s most seasoned footsoldiers declaring their return to active duty.
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