Coriky: Coriky review – keeping it hardcore
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Fugazi. An American art-rock institution, they provided a slinky, authoritative moral racket from the late 80s until the early 00s. Ever since this totemic post-hardcore band went on indefinite hiatus back in 2003, there have been calls for them to reform. They show no signs of doing that.
Analogues exist. Contemporary punk outfits such as Bristol punk heroes Idles are, consciously or not, made in Fugazi’s image: aggressive in sound, but communitarian in ethos, and constantly querying the testosterone lunacy that comes with the punk tag. Now, there is Coriky, a band made up of Fugazi’s singing guitarist Ian MacKaye and bassist Joe Lally, with the addition of singing drummer Amy Farina. (Before Coriky, MacKaye and Farina, who are married, released three albums as the Evens.)
No one outside a tight circle in Washington DC quite knows what “Coriky” means, or even how to pronounce it – it might refer to a dice game. The band themselves aren’t saying much: well before the mystique-building tactics of the online present day, there was the punk rock policy of not doing many interviews. There aren’t any band shots, either, just a fuzzy-felt rendition of the principals’ heads.
But Coriky are as close to the much-missed Fugazi as it gets in 2020. And they come thrillingly, deliciously near. MacKaye is back yelling and unleashing screes of guitar, with Lally unspooling dub and funk-influenced basslines which are not subordinate to MacKaye’s lead. Farina drums eloquently and provides a melodic vocal foil to MacKaye’s stentorian holler, much like his Fugazi co-frontman Guy Picciotto once did. In Coriky, this trio is creating an unexpected new chapter in one of the great plotlines in American alternative music.
If it is difficult to oversell Fugazi, their cachet is bound up with that of MacKaye, who still cuts something of an oracular, Jedi-like figure. When Kurt Cobain agonised about how Nirvana were selling out, his ethical barometer was personified by MacKaye. The working title for Nirvana’s In Utero was I Hate Myself and I Want to Die. In the handwritten tracklisting for the record in Cobain’s journals, he has scribbled “Ian MacKay” (sic) in the margin, seemingly addressing that working title personally to the Fugazi frontman (it rhymes too). (Cobain, for the record, said that In Utero’s working title was a joke, caricaturing his public persona.)
Before Fugazi, MacKaye was in Minor Threat, a hardcore act whose sense of humour is largely forgotten (“I was early to finish, I was late to start, I might be an adult, I’m a minor at heart,” went the song Minor Threat). To MacKaye’s occasional regret, another Minor Threat song, Straight Edge, inaugurated an ascetic, sober and drug-free mindset of the same name among certain devotees of post-hardcore punk.
Although straight edge created more than a few unthinking zealots – some of whom MacKaye seems to be addressing here on a song called Hard to Explain – it also challenged the idea that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll were rebellious. Real social or political change could be better achieved with a clear head, MacKaye was arguing, an ethic that dovetailed with a more all-encompassing suspicion of commerce, compromise and co-optation. “Never mind what’s been selling / It’s what you’re buying / And receiving undefiled,” Fugazi counselled on Blueprint.
The US DIY underground still follows much of this spiritual template. MacKaye, of course, has always disdained any sense that he is in charge of anything other than his own artistic output, or the label he started with Jeff Nelson, Dischord. But Coriky finds MacKaye back in something like warrior-sage mode. Two tracks have trailed this excellent self-titled album: Clean Kill and Too Many Husbands. If you’ve been listening to the Evens, the vocal interplay between MacKaye and Farina is familiar.
What’s new, or rather, older, is the skulking presence of Lally, a central contributor to Fugazi’s slinky resonance, now back in the US after some years living in Italy. There are pregnant, Fugazi-like pauses in between Clean Kill’s distinct parts; the instruments are often as lyrical as the vocalists.
“Soap and water! Never enough! Soap and water!” MacKaye and his bandmates howl. Clean Kill is not about Covid-19, although you could chant this refrain for 20 seconds while scouring your nail beds. The song seems to be about the awful normality of a soldier coming off shift having unleashed lethal drone strikes far away.
The rest of Coriky’s album is just as unimpressed by the state of the world, by the sinister future that has arrived too suddenly, and by how we might be in part culpable. Have a Cup of Tea also sounds like it might also be about foreign policy – “damaging to lessen the damage has damaged some more” – or the systemic failings baked into the American dream. (Being from DC has contributed significantly to MacKaye’s ethos.) The music is expansive too: there are hints of the Clash’s dub experiments and the brinkmanship of Fugazi’s Waiting Room.
Woulda Coulda, by contrast, is a slow-burning closer sung mostly by Farina, imagining a dried-up world. The chorus actually sounds like water flowing; MacKaye’s guitar is uncharacteristically sad and balmy.
Some songs here are downright opaque in their meaning – Too Many Husbands – and others appear less than fresh. Inauguration Day, for one, is still processing Trump Ground Zero, three years on. But there remains a palpable feeling that with Coriky, one of American music’s foremost consciences is very much back in business.
