FACS: Wish Defense
FACS: Wish Defense
Trouble In Mind Records 2/7/2025
FACS returns with a new record, Wish Defense. Yes, already. The standard album cycle for the Chicago post punk mavens is much, much, much longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly. But there are helpful insights to borrow from the existential drive of Drosophila melanogaster, which speeds through its larval and pupal stage in order to get to the good part, the fucking, before saying its final goodbye. FACS record launches come hard, fast, and provide a reliable thrill for a certain subset of the punker population that have successfully transitioned from hardcore to artcore. Wish Defense doesn’t let them down.
FACSBefore we get further into the specifics, though, please note: Wish Defense is the last album engineered by the late Steve Albini. He put in two days of work on the record at Electrical Audio before he passed away. Sanford Parker picked up where Albini left off, and John Congleton mixed the record.
FACS squirreled away this item in the final paragraph of their Bandcamp “liner notes.” Below the fold so you have to click “More” to read it. I feel more comfortable bumping the news item toward the front of this review and wondering aloud (I suppose, because I have more distance from the reality of Albini’s passing) how the untimely death impacted the in-process work of a band that seems preoccupied with themes of existential ephemerality.
How do engineers, mixers, and musicians, who’ve released titles like “Still Life In Decay,” “Present Tense,” and “Void Moments,” absorb the loss of an intimate collaborator and come together to complete a project? Is contemplation on death and loss in art any preparation for experiencing it in life? One hopes.
It might surprise you to learn that the occasional fruit fly lives long enough to see its offspring flourish. Albini lived to see hundreds, if not thousands, of his eggs navigate through the larval and the pupal stage to get to the good part, the fucking, before he passed away. Not with Wish Defense, of course, but he would have liked what he heard. A band knowing what they want to sound like, and sounding like it. No fuss, no muss.
So what does FACS sound like? The trio of Noah Leger (drums), Jonathan Van Herik (bass), and Brian Case (guitar, keys, vocals) combine to produce disciplined, minimalist rock n roll structures that never overcrowds the listening space. Unlike the three members’ previous band Disappears, which used distortion effects to fill all the nooks and crannies, FACS respects the sound of silence. Their favorite note might be the note they don’t play, which is a kind of cliche in jazz, but is a lesson that is still being learned within what’s left of the guitar-driven music in the wake of punk.
Traditionally, the musical use of negative space introduces at least two pregnant possibilities. First, the “hold,” building dramatic tension while the listener anticipates the arrival of an apparition to fill the void, which never comes. Second, the “release,” wherein the indefinite deferral of novelty is finally cashed in for something like cathartic relief.
Pretty much all music works this way. When Phish’s Trey Anastasio is hamming on a solo, at a certain point the listener grasps the pattern and becomes anxious for escape, which he delivers, by going up or down an octave, or updating the pattern, or handing off the solo to another instrument. The strategy works remarkably well; it doesn’t matter whether you’re a jam band, post punkers, or a polka musician – it works. It works for FACS too, but they’re playing weird games with the “release,” and you hear it on the very first track, “Talking Haunted.”
“Talking Haunted” gives us a kind of roadmap for the rest of the album. The first half establishes a kind of No Wave groove, built on the holy trinity of guitar, bass, and drums. Fine background music while sharing a cup of coffee with Glenn Branca’s ghost. You could imagine Kim Gordon’s raspy screamshout riding high on this hobbyhorse before exploding into a noisy finish.
But that’s not FACS. Case delivers the vocals with sober detachment, the lyrics lying like shattered glass on your doorstep that you realized too late was underfoot. In the back half of the song a spare groove unwinds, and keeps unwinding. You’re waiting for a “release” that never arrives, and Case, whose run out of lyrics, just keeps repeating the last line: “No feeling is final.”
In a different era, with a different kind of band, the engineer might have faded out a full minute earlier, to cut away repetition before it threatens to become pure monotony, and to give what remains of the song more pop. But that’s not the team behind the album, which cling to that final moment, however emptied out it becomes, with purposeful desperation.
You will find these voided moments sprinkled throughout Wish Defense. Moments where the path of the song becomes stuck on a single step. One side effect: more attention is redirected to Case’s vocals, and the lyrics of the vocals, which have assumed a more decisive role in determining the character of the band and their music than might have been true in previous projects.
The vocals are crisp, articulated, mixed for sonic clarity. You don’t need to run back and forth between the song and the liner notes to figure out what Case is saying. Understanding the “what” of what he’s saying is a different story. Like the rest of FACS’ sound, the lyrics are spare, abstract, fragmented, and present themselves as a kind of cipher.
“A Room” offers around twenty words for a 3:18 run time, which form a loose narrative with about as much flesh on it as a haiku. The listener is presumably invited to connect the dots, weave a story out of the bits and pieces. What story would we weave out of the following? And would the story say more about the song or about us? A kind of Rorschach experiment.
Lives I’ve lived
In this room
Thought you were alone
Clueless from privilege
Wasted and content
Thought you were alone
Leger’s drums draw you in as you ruminate on the meaning of the words. In fact, the jazziness of his rhythm would do well at a spoken word coffeehouse, were it not for the taut guitar and bass lines that transport you into more aggressive surroundings. Critique and conflict are in the air. But also a kind of incipient hesitation. The protagonist sounds like someone who’s lurched from certainty to certainty long enough to realize that some truths have a shelf life that expires while we’re still clinging to them. The lyrics of “A Room” are a half-thought, a fragment, an expired ideology, that distracts a mind more so than occupies it.
If you were waiting for the moment in Wish Defense for the band to let their hair down, keep waiting. FACS remains admirably committed to the bit. Almost pure hold, very little release. But a few moments of ecstatic noise punkery creep into the album, toward the end. A noisy, grindy groove opening “Desire Path.” The more open-ended, atmospheric guitar tones of “Sometimes Only” filling the air like tolling bells, continuing to drive the song hard into the fourth, fifth, sixth minute, which hints at a proper climax in the decomposing complexity of the amplified strings. And “You Future,” which flirts with a classic Sonic Youth-style, feedback-filled, guitar demolition finale, without ever quite arriving at the destination. Who knows? Maybe FACS tear up that song in live shows. But the studio version pulls back before the band truly launches themselves off the cliff’s edge.
FACS saves a little bit of themselves for another song, another album, another day. It’s the “always leave them wanting more” philosophy. So if Wish Defense is on the short side, no worries, it dovetails nicely with the rhythm of their release schedule, which never keeps you waiting long. Maybe it’s a full-length studio album. Maybe it’s a single, or a live album, or a collection of previously unreleased material. Whatever it is, it’s probably available on vinyl and reasonably priced.
After years of navigating the Midwest underground in dozens of different bands, the trio of FACS has hit their stride with another addition to their growing catalog. Wish Defense is the latest reminder of what can be accomplished, musically, by the paring down and cutting away of extraneous elements. The scope is limited, the audience is modest – but within their post punk, artcore microcosm is a multiverse (multi-, I say!) of artistic possibility. Their artful (dis-)engagement with “hold” and “release” musical strategies puts them in contact with an experimentalism that transcends genre formula, and puts them in a small category of musical artists who are still finding new ways to say interesting things with rock n roll.
It’s not music for everyone – you might be frustrated by sonic pleasures deferred, the static versus the ecstatic, the unavailability of easily-anticipated cathartic experiences. And that’s OK. To drop an Albini quote that’s floating around the internet, and might even be authentic, “Find people who think like you and stick with them. Make only music you are passionate about. Work only with people you like and trust. Don't sign anything.” FACS and FACS fans have found each other, and they’re sticking with each other, and they rarely ask each other to sign things.
Oh wait, here it is.
RIP Steve Albini
