In on the Kill Taker

Recording

The band had originally recorded songs in Chicago with producer Steve Albini at Chicago Recording Company studios, with the intention of releasing a two or three song EP. However, the group ended up recording a whole album's worth of material, but were ultimately unhappy with their performances and re-recorded the entire album in Washington D.C. at Inner Ear Studios with Don Zientara and Ted Niceley handling production duties. The original recordings from the Chicago sessions have since been bootlegged onto filesharing networks.

Despite the sessions in Chicago not entirely working out, it allowed the band to be well-prepared for what would become the album's proper recording sessions. According to singer/guitarist Guy Picciotto, “I think we really worked much harder on getting the songs together. We did a lot more pre-session demos, not just with Albini, but also using an 8-track reel-to-reel that we had bought to record our practices. It really changed the way we were able to work out the songs. It also helped us school ourselves a bit on how to engineer a basic recording.”

The album originally had the title In Pieces.

Music and Lyrics

The material on In on the Kill Taker retained the band's aggressive and rhythmic style, but displayed more diversity as well. This is evident in songs like "Smallpox Champion" which features surf-style guitar parts, combined with heavy syncopated riffs. "23 Beats Off" features a noise rock coda and the instrumental "Sweet and Low" showcases subdued guitar lines, melodic bass and jazz-influenced drumming.

Fugazi downplayed any conscious efforts to make Kill Taker more experimental or diverse. According to Picciotto “I don’t really think of any of the records as being any more experimental than any of the others, because to us they were all experiments,” he said. “We were just trying to figure stuff out and push ourselves further each time. So to my ear every record sounds like a step forward, or sideways, or at least somewhere else from the one before it.”

The album's lyrics frequently reference films, in particular the song "Cassavetes" which is a tribute to actor/filmmaker John Cassavetes, as well as a critique of Hollywood culture. The song "Walken's Syndrome" references Woody Allen's film Annie Hall, where Christopher Walken's character feels an urge to crash into oncoming traffic at night.

Release and reception

In on the Kill Taker was released to both critical and commercial success. The album sold over 180,000 copies in its first week of release and has gone on to sell over 1,000,000 copies. The record also garnered rave reviews from many publications including Spin, TIME magazine and Rolling Stone, with Rolling Stone writer Matt Diehl claiming that Fugazi is "the only band that matters." AllMusic critic Andy Kellman wrote: "It's probably Fugazi's least digestible record from front to back, but each track has its own attractive qualities, even if not immediately perceptible." Jonathan Gold of Los Angeles Times thought that on the album, "Fugazi works in more or less the same meta-pop ballpark as Sonic Youth," and further stated: "Fugazi hasn't a whimsical bone in its collective body, and the lyrics dance around the gloomiest topics in oblique college-poetry metaphor."

Packaging

Filmmaker Jem Cohen, a long-time friend and collaborator of the band, was responsible for some of the album's art design and packaging. Found pieces of text and photographs were used to make up the overall layout. The cover image, showing a burned-out gold Polaroid of the Washington Monument, was found by Cohen in the street. The inner sleeve was a piece that Jeremy Blake,a friend of the band found tacked to a light post in Chicago. The text on the cover side margin and back cover were also found on the ground in New York City by Cohen and contained the phrase "...so I could have tried to put a stop to the hater, the adversary workers, iniquity evildoers. This is big because people in high places are in on the kill taker".

Tour

By the time the In on the Kill Taker tour was underway, the group began to sell-out large auditoriums and arenas, as well as receive more lucrative major label offers. During the band's sold-out 3-night stint at New York City's Roseland Ballroom in September 1993, music mogul and Atlantic Records president Ahmet Ertegün met with the band backstage in an attempt to sign them. Ertegün offered the band "anything you want," their own subsidiary label and more than $10 million just to sign with Atlantic. Fugazi declined the offer. The organizers of Lollapalooza also attempted to recruit the band for a headlining slot on its 1993 tour, which the band considered but ultimately turned down.

Track listing

All songs by Guy Picciotto, Ian MacKaye, Joe Lally, and Brendan Canty (Lead vocals in parentheses)

Personnel

Technical