Coriky: Coriky | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- The term "influential" is thrown around a lot by music critics, but few artists can legitimately claim to have changed the course of rock'n'roll as much as Ian Mackaye.

In 1979, Mackaye was playing in The Teen Idles - one of the first bands to ratchet up the speed and intensity of punk rock to a point where they earned the term 'hardcore punk". It's quite well known that a song written by Mackaye for his next band Minor Threat was the inspiration for the drug and alcohol free "straight edge" punk scene still going strong nearly 4 decades later. But less well remembered is that the origins of another long-lasting punk subgenere can be attributed to Mackaye - Thrasher magazine in 1985 coined the term "emo-core" to describe a record by his next band Embrace. Through the 90's his band Fugazi broadened punk's musical palette while becoming the most iconic example of DIY ethics in the face of the major label alternative rock boom.

So Mackaye can claim to be a genuine rock'n'roll trailblazer. At 58 years old, he is still creating with a new band Coriky and a new self-titled album. In true Washington DC punk scene style, Coriky has an intertwined family tree. Fugazi bass player Joe Lally is back, while the other third of the band is Mackaye's wife Amy Farina, who has previously released three albums with her husband as acoustic duo The Evens.

Fans of The Evens will recognise similarities with that band in Coriky - the same kind of tense minimal songs, with Farina's vocals sometimes providing a poppier counterpoint. There's a little bit of Fugazi's quieter moments there too, in the familiar interplay between Mackaye and Lally.

Mackaye is not renowned for his light-heartedness, but surely even he would appreciate the strange humour in hearing an album whose release was delayed by the COVID pandemic open with the refrain of "not enough soap and water". The song though is about US drone warfare and the myth of the "clean kill".

Lyrically, the album is vague and abstruse, but undeniably filled with comments on society. US foreign wars are there, and plenty of references to online technology. "We’re eating something, but it’s not food,” MacKaye sings. “Menu operated by algorithm/Leaves us wanting but not in the mood."

Often Mackaye sings as a kind of detached narrator. Inauguration Day is about Trump, but surprisingly lacking in the anger you might expect from a punk rock legend. "There’s some people here to see you/I don’t think they agree with you" it says. It carries the resignation of a Washington DC local with years of struggling for change - concluding "What’s surprising is the expectation that we’d ever have a say". The abum ends with a slow sparse song about a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the refrain "woulda coulda shoulda but I didn't".

Is Ian Mackaye the righteous punk preacher and musical innovator losing steam? Coriky is not an album that will be hailed in the future as starting a new musical style, and even the old ethic of DIY seems less inspiring in a world where old media empires are struggling and the internet has offered a decentralised connectivity but not the liberation from capitalism that a Fugazi song like Merchandise promised. And yet Mackaye is still there, making music that doesn't really sound like anyone else, putting out records on his defiantly independent Dischord Records. Punk rock thrives on the naive energy of youth, but Coriky is literally an old married couple plus a collaborator of more than three decades. It's the sound of punk growing up, adapting, gaining perspective, but surviving.

- Andy Paine.
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