#facs

It begins in clanking dissonance as von Herik lays in slithering menace while drummer Noah Leger’s beat alternatingly bunches and elongates, like a slinky coiling down the stares. Brian Case, as always, finds space in the echo-laced mix, letting the white space between phrases stretch to abyss-like lacunae. “Love…this weapon is absolute…the safety of custom…and history…you can’t refuse.” Periodically the guitar turns lighter and more lyrical, providing a lift in the music that’s like light streaming in through the skylight of a dark place. But overall, the vibe is dank and glowering, alienated and inscrutable.

There is often quite a lot of negative space in FACS’ impacted, complicated grooves, but “Ordinary Voices” starts uncharacteristically in a blurring firehose of tone. Guitar notes bleed into each other in radiating bursts, while sticks on cymbals slur and slash in continual agitation. The song resolves, as FACS cuts often do, in a slouching ritual beat, the drums making a slow heartbeat rhythm, bum-ba-dum, bum-ba-dum. The music pulses and seethes, finding a doom-y propulsion.  

Case says that Wish Defense is concerned with the duality of man—the disconnect between the way we are and the way we’re perceived—and the title track puts this thesis forward most directly. “Enter the mirror / Double walker / An intimate / Wish defense / Is it real? / You beside me / The detail / Terrifying / Abject self / Your grief / A public / Performance,” he chants, against a lumbering riff that pulls up short, like the light just turned to red. And then, more agitatedly, he shouts, “I’m not here” and “Are you real?” repeatedly, in a frenzy of existential inquiry. Musically, too, the song butts and rears against invisible constraints; it’s not comfortable with itself. No, this is a desperate dance self-preservation, limned in bass and guitar and drums, boxy like the Ex or certain iterations of the band E.

You may have heard that FACS was the last band to record with Steve Albini, and this album captures their prickly agitation with remarkable clarity. After Albini passed away, between recording sessions, they finished with John Congleton, and if there’s a difference between the sound and aura of the two sets of tracks, I, personally, am unable to hear it.  

What I do hear, however, is a precise and focused form of musical anarchy, an assault that is tightly disciplined but unfettered by guardrails. FACS has been a monster band for a while. Wish Defense may be their best so far.