New York City's Palladium is an odd place for a Fugazi concert. The Washington D.C.-based band has its roots in '80s hardcore (Fugazi co-singer/songwriter/guitarist Ian MacKaye fronted the pioneering Minor Threat), but the cavernous venue captures the spirit of that decade in a more "Bright Lights, Big City" sort of way. The club is adorned with banks of red disco lights and reflective-tiled female statuettes suspended from the ceiling, but the group is strictly a jeans-and-T-shirt affair, and a beer at the bar costs as much as the principled band's $5 ticket price. But when Fugazi took the stage Thursday night, they rejected the opening acts' multi-colored lighting in favor of bright white, and performed for two hours on their own terms.
\\The show was Fugazi's first in six months, and it showed; the usually drum-tight group was looser than usual. That was partly because of technical problems with singer/guitarist Guy Picciotto's guitar, which forced the rest of the band to noodle aimlessly while he tried to get his act together. But it's also because some of Fugazi's new material -- which they're apparently still working out -- is so musically complex it at times verged on prog-rock. One seemingly interminable new song featured Picciotto on the clarinet, of all instruments. Another allowed MacKaye (who usually barks) to actually sing. The sound of his whispery vocals over a bed of soft guitar was genuinely pretty.
\\Of course, it was the older, more straight-ahead material -- "Suggestion," "Give Me the Cure," "Provisional" -- that got the biggest rise out of the all-ages audience, and the band's piece de resistance was the final encore, an extended version of "Waiting Room." The song -- with its stop-on-a-dime dynamics and call-and-response interplay between MacKaye and Picciotto -- plays to all of Fugazi's str
