The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis: Deface the Currency

The distance between the underground rock scene and the genre-bending free jazz movement of the 1960s is shorter than it appears. On their second full-length collaboration, Deface the Currency, The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis have managed to erase that distance by uniting the post-punk precision of the Washington D.C hardcore scene with the high-octane energy of Detroit's revolutionary rock heritage. They then forge a powerful bond between "New Thing" avant-garde legends Pharoah Sanders and Sonny Sharrock with the high-energy intensity and passion of Detroit's MC5 and The Stooges, as well as Washington, D.C.'s Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, and Faraquet. Make no mistake, while they successfully capture the spirit of both camps, the sound is entirely their own.

Accomplishing this is no easy task. Still, the powerhouse lineup of the band, which includes ex-Fugazi members—bassist Joe Lally and Brendan Canty  on drums—provides the telepathic rhythmic foundation that guitarist Anthony Pirog and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis use to their advantage to craft piercing and aggressive lead lines that take the music wherever they want it to go, pushing each other into attack mode on the opening track, "Deface the Currency." Not just the title track, it also provides a mission statement for the band. Here, Lewis plays with a sense of urgency and aggression that his saxophone can barely contain; it shrieks and honks passionately, while also displaying a bluesy toughness one does not ordinarily hear him use in his more traditional quartet format. This toughness allows him to meet the Messthetics' powerful rhythmic engine head-on, a sonic explosion that pushes both to new heights.

While it is certainly true that Canty, Lally and Lewis are the engine and the high octane fuel, the music requires a spark to cause combustion, and that spark is Pirog. A player as equally at home in the underground world of rock as he is in the halls of jazz and beyond, Pirog is the glue that ties it all together, serving as the bridge on which all roads converge. Nowhere is this more evident than on "Clutch," the penultimate track on the album. Starting simply with a beautiful Pirog guitar riff before the whole band joins in, Pirog then lays out and provides a chorded guitar bed for Lewis to solo over, before getting his chance to fire off a memorable, scorching solo himself. The real magic happens when the two of them play together, repeating the track's main theme multiple times in perfect unison throughout.

Playing approximately 150 live shows has given the group a sense of familiarity with one another that allows the music to burn and to shift direction with just a look or a simple gesture. This shared musical intuition inspires them to keep pushing boundaries rather than settling into a comfortable groove. "Serpent Tongue (Slight Return)," a track from the 2018 first Messthetics album, is remade here as the album closer. On the debut album, it was a fiery math rock manifesto; here, it is a full-blown skronk masterpiece that calls to mind not just Sharrock's final album, Ask The Ages (Milestone Records, 1991), but reminds listeners that music can smash through the walls that try to pigeonhole it into a certain genre. Deface the Currency is at its best when it throws away the old rules and genre definitions and creates its own "New Thing."