Fugazi’s Joe Lally and Brendan Canty Get Back in the Groove With The Messthetics

The more Gen-X bands one sees reuniting too late (to make any impact beyond stacking cash and stoking nostalgia, that is — looking at you, Rage Against the Machine) the more respect one has for Fugazi letting it be.

After all, it’s not as if the D.C. punk firebrands and Dischord Records main men left many stones unturned. The foursome’s six studio albums and four EPs between 1988 and 2001 expanded the language of punk rock with their forays into dub, jazz and beyond. The lyrics of co-frontmen Guy Picciotto and Ian MacKaye intertwined the personal and the political in ways that still feel extraordinarily relevant. According to graphic designer and Fugazi fanatic Carni Klirs’ massive zine Visualizing the History of Fugazi, the band played 1,048 shows in 372 cities on five continents. More than 800 of those concerts live in Dischord’s online archive Fugazi Live Series, which is packed with soundboard recordings and replete with set lists, photos and whatever other ephemera survived.

The smattering of new music that Fugazi’s members have issued since going out in style with 2001’s The Argument has had a low-key, low-stakes air about it — perhaps by design, to evade comparisons. It ranges from Mac-Kaye’s twee-tinged The Evens to drummer Brendan Canty’s alt-rock combo Deathfix to bassist Joe Lally’s three solo LPs, which were so sparse they verged on silence.

That’s fine, yet it’s also what makes the rise of The Messthetics so satisfying. The incendiary instrumental-rock meeting of the minds between Lally, Canty and budding guitar god Anthony Pirog — they’ll make their Nashville debut Saturday at Drkmttr — feels at once like a slight return, and a leap forward. 

The seed for The Messthetics was planted in 2015, when Lally returned to D.C. after eight years living the expatriate life in Rome with his Italian-born wife and daughter. Having hit a wall writing his fourth solo record, he linked up with Canty — with whom he hadn’t played live since Fugazi went dark — in hopes of bringing the song skeletons he’d come up with to life.

“I wasn’t ready to make another record that had lyrics — and I’m still not ready — because I just felt like I was bitching,” Lally tells the Scene via phone. Canty heard potential in the material, Lally says, but determined that it could benefit from the capabilities of a musician with a knack for improvisation. Enter Pirog, a prodigious ringer from D.C.’s avant-garde underground. “I’d never heard of Anthony — never met him, never seen him,” says Lally. “But Brendan had seen all these different versions of the way he played … surf, free jazz, bluegrass, all kinds of shit.” 

The duo drafted Pirog for a practice session. It didn’t take long to realize they’d found their missing piece. 

“Suddenly, the whole thing pumped up way harder, pushing into this jacked-up rock thing,” Lally says. “I was trying to sing to keep up with it, then realized when you’re playing with Hendrix, you shut up and listen to what he has to play. A month later [Pirog] asked to get together again, and Brendan and I were like, ‘Yes, we’re there!’ ”

In early 2018, The Messthetics dropped their self-titled Dischord debut. The nine-song collection wows with its airtight prog-punk stylings, anchored by Lally and Canty’s ever-intrepid rhythmic interplay, then elevated to new, psychedelic heights by Pirog’s gutsy curlicue riffage. Taking it on the road, the trio found a new gear. With the foundation in place, improvising became a bigger and bigger part of its performances. 

That led to a live collab with artist and poet Lonnie Holley at Big Ears Festival in Knoxville in March. A second Messthetics record — the more loosely structured yet still plenty aggressive Anthropocosmic Nest — came six months later. Nest pulls a bit of a fakeout with its opener “Better Wings,” a straight-ahead ripper not unlike something off the mid-period Fugazi classic In on the Kill Taker, before giving in fully to jazzier trappings that showcase Pirog’s moody, casual shredding.

“That guy does crazy shit,” Lally says of Pirog. “People love it when they see it. I don’t think Fugazi fans expected [Messthetics] to be such a totally, completely formed thing. It’s still me and Brendan, but it’s something else.”

Has The Messthetics’ emergence made fans get off Lally and Canty’s case about when their old band will play together again? Lally gives a resounding no.

“But I don’t mind,” he says with a laugh. “All I ever wanted to do was be completely dedicated to a band, and then I got to do that in that band. It was a fucking huge part of my life. The fact you made any kind of mark on anyone and how they think about things — that’s why you do this.”