Fucoustic
07.18.07
Don Pedro's (New York)
words: Jason Dean
photos: blogs.msg.com

It took a Swiss native, Robert Frank, to redefine photography and how America looked at the '50s. Flash to the present day, and Austria's Fucoustic is taking an American standard, Fugazi, and reinterpreting their seminal material in a completely new way.

This was their first show in America and it was at Don Pedro’s, deep in East Williamsburg. Daniel Amann and Andi Ganter, on acoustic guitars and in classic Fugazi style, constantly decided what song to play next. They pounded out beats on the tops of their guitars and played off each other like Ian and Guy, trading vocal duties. Every song started out familiar, but remained unrecognizable until a melody or lyric would creep through. In the middle of the set, Christine Mairer added cello accompaniment to songs such as "The Argument," which I can’t help but hear now in the original Fugazi track.

The songs they chose were from Fugazi's darker side, the melodic and more intricate. The entire back catalog was thoroughly examined from Repeater to The Argument, all the time staying true to the guitar dissonance and experimentation of Fugazi, the plucking harmonics, or using the tuning peg strings as a high pitch harpsichord. But even more importantly Fugazi is about restraint, holding back those huge moments, the easy payoffs. Fucoustic celebrates this with the innate qualities of the acoustic guitar, one minute quietly scraping a pick down a string and then exploding into chords the next.

Fugazi proved with The Argument that punk didn’t have to be characteristically loud to be effective and Fucoustic is taking that premise still farther, applying it to strictly acoustic guitars yet managing to keep the same energy. The result is a translation of the original tracks into fragile, stripped down compositions.

Sometimes it can be as simple as a sincere performance that allows you to go back and reexamine a momentous band from a new perspective. I’m guilty of letting Fugazi sit on a shelf, overlooking the impact they had on an impressionable high school kid. Fucoustic brings it all back in a contemporary way and emphasizes the things that made Fugazi so important. Fucoustic, in succeeding in their homage to the DC legends, are doing something important in their own right.