Brendan Canty is best known for drumming in Fugazi, holding down solid, tightly controlled grooves in a band that always sounded like it was about to explode. Canty also wrote guitar and bass parts for Fugazi during their 16-year run, but he didn’t front a group himself till he formed Deathfix in 2009 with Rich Morel (they met while touring in Bob Mould’s backing band) and Medications members Mark Cisneros and Devin Ocampo. The sound of Deathfix is the sound of punks aging gracefully—gritty, dark, and moody, but with an excellent melodic sense. Canty has always been ahead of the curve, and that’s still the case with Deathfix.
I think, really, what we need to talk about is—what I know that you want to talk about—is Fugazi re-forming just to play the [Steve] Albini Kill Taker demos. Do you think that’s a good idea?
It’s really direct. The demos are pretty similar to what’s on the record, except for they’re mushy—they’re just ill-formed mushiness and they don’t actually resolve or anything, but the writing is all there, and the lyrics. Some of the more extended songs on the record, like “Playboy,” which ends up shifting time and gets really complicated—all that was done with Devin [Ocampo] and Mark [Cisneros] in the practice space. The core of the writing, a lot of it just conceptually and lyrically, happens still with Rich and I getting together. It’s really important to have some quiet time, you know? Some peace and quiet when you’re trying to write. And we’re really—I mean, you’ve seen the Medications. Maybe you’ve never seen Devin play drums, but he’s kind of a monster. And we practice in this big warehouse space. It’s like a cavern. It’s really loud and bombastic and great. We love to play together, but it’s not always the best for communicating small ideas to each other.
You’re mainly known as a drummer, but you’ve played guitar and written on guitar and piano and bass, historically—you had a lot of input in Fugazi at least. But is this your first time doing a substantial amount of work live playing guitar as your main instrument?
Have you heard of the Burn to Shine project? We did Burn to Shine up there with Bob Weston. I had been scoring for TV and political spots and junk like that, sort of making a side living doing that stuff because I’d been asked. A lot of our friends who were initially in the D.C. punk-rock community ended up moving on—not people who were in bands as much as people like you, who were artists or had magazines. A lot of ’em went into TV and went into CD-ROM video games, just whatever was out there when all that stuff was kind of blowing up. They were just trying to hire the people they trusted. The first thing I did for the Discovery Channel was a series called Buildings, Bridges, and Tunnels, and it was just that. It was just scoring for skyscrapers and bridges. This was before Pro Tools, and I was doing it on an eight-track reel-to-reel with a stopwatch—just totally BSing my way through it.
That’s when I met Christoph Green, who’s my partner in Trixie [Film], who did all those [Burn to Shine videos] with me. He’s a great graphics artist. We were sitting around working on the Kerry campaign next to each other—all these new cameras were coming out that were shooting at 24p, and digital started to look really good. And right about that same time a friend of mine had bought a house—this was also during the real estate boom—from this old woman who lived until she was 97, and they were about to tear it down. And he felt terrible about it because he knew the woman and he knew the history of the house. So he asked me if I wanted to do anything with it—he just wanted to memorialize it somehow—and we came up with this idea of creating a portrait.
Sun 3/10, 8 PM, Schubas, $10. 18+
