Joe Lally on “Deface the Currency”, Fugazi, and His Philosophy on Bass

The beauty of instrumental music is that it can be interpreted in many ways. For Joe Lally, the new Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis album Deface the Currency is a work that stands on its own and as a reflection of everything around us.

“It’s about music, and it’s about the lives that we’re living, the times that we’re living in,” he says.

Their second collaboration with saxophonist Lewis delves deeper into their sound as a quartet with new textures and a sense of urgency. It blasts off with the title track, a dense and frenetic composition that defies genre. At the heart of the music, though, is each member’s unique background. Lally grew up in the greater Washington, DC area, where he was exposed to James Brown, Otis Redding, Sly and the Family Stone, and similar artists on the local radio.

Watch our full interview with Joe Lally below.

Joe Lally’s DC Roots and Early Influences

“Your location probably ends up saying a lot about where you’re coming from and where you’re going to and how you play,” he reflects. “And, you know, I had my neighbors, older brothers listening to that stuff. I was following a certain path from an early age and that’s based on what there was in this area to hear.”

He would also visit a venue called Shady Grove to watch afternoon concerts by The Isley Brothers, The Spinners, and the Jackson 5. From the outside, those may seem like unlikely influences for a bassist who became an influence himself for his work in the post-hardcore band Fugazi, but they informed his sense of groove and melody from the bottom up.

In Fugazi and The Messthetics, he uses the bass to lay the foundation, with bass lines that function as their own voice rather than simple chord identifiers. That shows up on Deface the Currency in Lally’s composition “Rules of the Game,” which features a twisting earworm of a bass line.

The Messthetics and Deface the Currency

Moreover, the album is a solidification of the quartet’s dynamic. It was created after extensive touring, where they honed their new quartet sound. The core of The Messthetics is the trio of Lally, guitarist Anthony Pirog, and drummer Brendan Canty, with whom the bassist has played for decades. They formed the rhythm section for Fugazi for 15 years and developed an incomparable chemistry before reuniting as The Messthetics.

“I’ve enjoyed other drummers that I’ve played with, [but] there is really no comparison to playing with Brendan, because [that] was also the entire time I’m cutting my teeth in how to play music and write and play live and all of that stuff,” he explains. “It’s just something that can happen when you forge that much time together. I think that, yeah, probably the depth of what you’re learning and so on, it’s very hard to compare to. It’s an amazing thing and I really, really am aware of how fortunate I am that I get to do that.”

Fugazi, Steve Albini, and Recording Bass

Lally is focused on the present and future, but Fugazi’s history looms large. The group, which has been on indefinite hiatus since 2003, is still using its music for good. They just released a previously shelved album recorded and produced by the late indie rock icon Steve Albini. The effort came in the fall of 1992, while they were preparing their third studio album. Fugazi worked with Albini at his home studio in Chicago for several days, but the result wasn’t what they were hoping for.

“We just had a really good hang with him, recorded all this music. But then, actually, we all went away from the session [feeling it did] not sound the way [we were] enjoying it when we were together. And that included [Albini],” Lally admits. “We decided we would just be respectful about it, not try to do anything special with any of it, and just kind of move on.”

They went home and recorded what would become In On the Killtaker with Ted Nicely. The Albini sessions were leaked and circulated in varying levels of quality. “I even owned a cassette of it that was apparently at the wrong speed. You know, if that could happen to me imagine the stuff that was out on the internet that people were listening to and the quality of it,” he says. The new digital-only release pays tribute to Albini by benefiting the non-profit Letters Charity organization, which was a big part of Albini’s life and legacy. (Get it now from Bandcamp.)

When we asked him about the session, Lally recalls Albini’s direction for recording bass and his own mindset for tracking.

“The only thing was he did not want to record me direct,” Lally states. “He just put a microphone in front of the cabinet, which at the time for me was odd. I was playing my Music Man, which I actually didn’t really want to record with anymore. At that point, I would be borrowing another bass. I might have recorded on Steady Diet of Nothing with it. I really stopped using it after that. It was just a bass that I didn’t like the way it sounded so much as a recorded instrument. It was very good for the band live and everyone being able to hear it on stage, but in the studio it became a different thing. We started recording ourselves not long after that. I think that’s when I really felt it because we’re doing our own eight-track recordings and I just [felt it] sounded really sterile. It’s an active pickup is about all I’m trying to say.”

Joe Lally’s Bass Gear

Pivoting to the modern day, Lally also gave us the rundown on his current bass rig. He uses a Benson B700 bass amp matched to a 1×15 cabinet, a lightweight and powerful rig fit for touring with The Messthetics. He also has two unique basses. First is the Abernethy Sonic Empress. The medium-scale bass has a Musicmaster look and is fitted with a Lindy Fralin split-coil ’51 P-bass pickup. Its solid-body style makes for a sturdy road instrument.

The second is a custom bass he made with Dave Johnson of Nashville’s Scale Model Guitars. Dubbed the Cosmos as an homage to Sun Ra, it is a single-cutaway design based on a Club-style Hofner. The short-scale bass has a neck modeled after a ’60s Gibson guitar neck. Its unique design is matched by a unique tone that came about by a happy accident.

“[Dave Johnson] had someone make pickups, and they didn’t turn out right. And this was during COVID when he made it,” Lally says. “He said, ‘I can’t wait. I want to send it to you. I’m going to get you pickups.’ It arrived with Lollar double humbucking guitar pickups – dual rail guitar pickups in my bass. I was like, ‘What is going on?!’ I like less choices. It turned out to be a phenomenal-sounding bass. When you design a bass, you have no idea what it’s going to sound like. But somehow, it’s great in the band. When I brought it into a practice to play, Anthony and Brendan were like, ‘That thing is really wild.’ I can really hear. And it’s louder than any of my basses. It’s just really wild.”

Joe Lally’s Bass Philosophy

Lally plugs straight into the amp, eschewing any pedals. That’s partly because of an unfortunate tuner pedal incident, but it boils down to his bass philosophy of staying true to your own art.

“It’s very clear to me what I’m doing: I’m playing the bass, here,” speaking of the frequency range in a band. “I think it directs my writing because of that. I do feel a bit about pedals that you’re a little bit taken away from what you’re really writing.”

Lally cites guitar players like Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page as influences just as much as the lead bass stylings of Larry Graham and Bootsy Collins. Riff-based rock created the core of his musical approach.

“As a bass player, I honestly thought about riffs, and that had to do with my conceptualizing of how music worked. I thought the bass would carry the melody like it does in dub or something. But really, I was thinking about a melody, a riff, not the way bass is supposed to function in normal songs. I didn’t think about that a lot. It helps to work within your crazy vision of things, the parameters of what you can do. So you reach your authenticity.”