EVENS - The Evens

Dedicated to anyone who chain-smokes one cigarette after another. Music of odors, shady enough to instill fear, not comfortable enough to sit on a couch and wrap your legs around it too. Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina strip hardcore of (almost) all its previous incarnations and dress it up with fake melodies, middle-school recital line-readings, and blown-out firecracker explosions. No pretensions. They let the bare minimum flow by, "uh uh…" that sound like white lines on a highway closed for fog, accordions that seem to be played by someone bored during sound-check, hushed voices grappling with duets that make a mockery of the very idea of a duet.

After twenty years lived dangerously alongside Minor Threat, Embrace and Fugazi, after having given a beautiful meaning to the term indie, turning Washington DC into a volcano in constant eruption of talent and attitude, Ian MacKaye decides to throw everyone off with a step that's neither forward nor backward, but sideways: the gilded rooms of indie-pop now welcome someone who has never really hung around them, someone who doesn't know gentle ways in music and who has made the scream his trademark. The boss of the Dischord house, flanked as mentioned by Amy Farina (formerly on drums in the Warmers, also part of the Dischord circle), fires off the twelve shots you don't expect, leaving distortion pedals and guitars at home, relying on a baritone six-string and little else to arrange what already stands out as one of the most important records of the year.

We're facing a minimalism closer to simplicity than to smugness, as "Sara Lee" demonstrates, opened by an idle whistle and ritualistic drums, waiting for his low-register vocal to come in. Then a guitar marks an endless pause on the staff, while around it the male and the female give themselves over to the chorus, or to whatever passes for one. Finally, abstract strikes on the crash close the account. "Sara Lee" is the emblem of the new direction, one that softens the harshness only to exhume it in the form of amateur noise. Or one that relies on arrangements close to a household chore. Indeed, "Around The Corner" offers, as a fixed menu item, three low double-stops, simulating the shape of a harmony.

It's up to Farina to bridge the lulls, singing like a Carole King in a coma and composing rhythms fit for pots and pans in a closet. There's little to ponder here, the record has charm, and this is an unusually amateurish MacKaye, relaxed and tender. Still, there's no shortage of typically Fugazi-esque moments, where the tone sharpens slightly and the political commitment that has always distinguished the mother band resurfaces, as in "All These Governors," which opens with a proclamation that leaves little room for interpretation ("Generally, I don't speak ill of the dead, however I might make an exception in this case"); a riff and an off-beat drum pattern build just the right anticipation for the chorus's tighter rhythm, during which you almost hope Guy Picciotto's sharp voice will burst out of some groove to spar with MacKaye's powerful tone. Nor are choral moments lacking, like "Mt. Pleasant Isn't," a folk tune fit for a decked-out town square, half turned away, one eye looking back, utterly enchanted by the West Coast.

Special mention goes to "Blessed Not Lucky," an antidepressant disguised as aspirin, melodically flawless and predictable in its lines, but no less removed from the mundane for that. It's simply pop as reimagined by anti-pop, which is no small thing. Closing things out is "You Won't Feel A Thing," a minimal-naive take on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" minus the killer chorus, with the two singing in cahoots: a continuous call-and-response with Fugazi's gruff frontman even daring a falsetto line.

Should it get a sequel, this experiment would trace the frame of a pocket shutter.

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30/04/2026