Send "Fucked Up " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Contactmusic |
 The third full length album by modern day Punk legends Fucked Up is a rock opera in four parts, a concept album, and the tale of love and loss in Thatcherite Britain. It's over an hour long and consists of 18 tracks; it is by all counts what one would call epic. For those who don't know of Fucked Up they are a largely experimental Hardcore Punk band and when the opening track of David Comes To Life starts you could be forgiven for wondering if you had put the wrong CD in; 'Let Her Rest' with its sweeping keyboard melodies and sonically ambient guitar distortions does not sound like the work of a band with swears in their name, but then you know what they say about assuming. Having listened to music before you will be aware that this record offers far more than 18 three minute songs, even for a concept album, the intricacy and thought here is on another level entirely with characters and plot points and dialogue: "hello, my name is David, your name is Veronica, let's be together, let's fall in love." Of course you can't have characters and dialogue without a narrator and that is where Fucked Up has some fun, for this narrator becomes increasingly unreliable as the album progresses: "I told you it was him. I tell it like it is. The story served his purpose and look at what he did. I just read the lines-the acts are his designs." 10,000 Marbles (Mike Haliechuk) and Pink Eyes (Damian Abraham) are responsible for these lyrical ballads and they are experts at what they have done with songs referencing details in earlier songs, particularly 'The Other Shoe', David Comes To Life benefits repeated listening. If, understandably, you get a bit lost in the story each song has a subtitle to keep you on the right path, they go from; "David and Veronica Meet" through "The personified David and Octavio spar in a side story" finally back around to "David comes to life, with love in his heart." While it's quiet easy to immerse yourself in the story of this album it is only one of its delights. Musically this is a beautiful mix of old school punk and modern melodies; it makes for a sound unique to Fucked Up. The rawness of Abraham's voice sounds like he has broken glass for vocal chords and his angry stilted delivery creates a tension in the songs that reflects the story; it's almost like his lyrics are being tattooed on you as they leave his mouth. The backing vocals are brilliant throughout; delivered by numerous individuals, the innocent performance by Jennifer Castle stands out as one of the albums charming quirks. With three guitarists, a bass player, and a drummer to add to the line-up there is a lot to sink your teeth into here and if you had to complain about anything it's that there is too much and by song ten you feel ready for a bit of a breather. It is a hard going record, but as a music fan you should relish the challenge that is so rare for a band to offer you these days. The layering of chugging rhythm and riffing lead guitars throughout this experience is stunning and goes above and beyond anything punk usually offers; if you stripped all the vocals away this could at times be a Mogwai record- see 'Ship Of Fools.' Fucked Up are a distinctive proposition in today's musical climate, people of course use the same type of high pitched distorted guitar melodies, but to mix it with Hardcore is a charm only applicable to them, 'I Was There' one of the fines tracks on the record does this well. Sure we have Hardcore punk bands like The Bronx that spring to mind, but this is more akin to Jawbreaker or Black Flag with a little Dead Kennedy's thrown in....full text |
| Spin |
| Toronto's fucked up possess quite a few barriers to entry. There's the fitting yet unfit-for-print name, for starters. Then there are the band's chaotic live shows, during which gargantuan frontman Damian Abraham -- imagine the Neverending Story's Rockbiter, only beardier -- often bonks his noggin till it bleeds. Finally, there's the music itself, a hardcore punk-indebted slurry of grunt-gargling vocals, serrated feedback squalls, and densely packed lyrics that cover everything from police brutality to metaphysical phenomena. It makes for great workout music, provided your workout consists of jogging through a quarry while on mescaline. The band's maximalistic approach means that even the most ostensibly straightforward task -- writing a collection of songs about love -- becomes a huge undertaking, as evidenced by David Comes to Life, Fucked Up's third studio album and first kinda-sorta musical. An 18-song bildungsroman that runs nearly 80 minutes, David is alarmingly caustic, disarmingly graceful, and loaded with all sorts of unnecessary lyrical twists and fake-outs. It's one of the most overly complicated hard-rock records of the past ten years. It's also one of the best. The tale of a glum factory drone who may or may not have killed his soul mate, David rarely makes a lick of sense; the characters are too thinly drawn, and the escape-hatch plot-reveals too cynically gimmicky, while the story line requires a novella's worth of liner notes to comprehend (a series of accompanying seven-inches may flesh out the characters, though that feels a bit like a cheat). As a cohesive musical statement, it's a mess. The only way this thing will play on Broadway is if someone blasts it out of an unmarked van parked in Times Square. But David's core themes -- romantic self-defeat, misplaced deification -- are so resonant and sturdy that the songs stand on their own. And holy moly, those songs! Fucked Up, or more specifically, founding member and lead guitarist Mike Haliechuk, layer track upon track until they achieve a sort of black-hole density. Haliechuk and fellow guitarist Ben Cook send power chords swooping and soaring like a giant's scythe; Jonah Falco's drums kick with rat-a-tat urgency; and Abraham's roar rises high and rings clear, aided by backing vocalists Jennifer Castle and Madeline Follin of Cults....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| Punk rock has had its share of ambitious bands producing ambitious records-- Double Nickels on the Dime, Zen Arcade, Sandinista!, and The Shape of Punk to Come spring to mind-- but few groups in this sphere have pushed the envelope as often as Fucked Up. For the last few years, they've been releasing singles as part of a series based on the Chinese Zodiac, each of which usually runs over the 10-minute mark. For a 2007 charity Christmas single, they managed to get James Murphy, Nelly Furtado, and "Degrassi: the Next Generation"/"90210" actress Shenae Grimes (among many, many others) to appear on the same song; during a 12-hour (!) NYC concert in 2008, they got moshers to smash along to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig doing Descendents covers. Their reach continues unabated on their new album, David Comes to Life, a 78-minute rock opera. The story of David Comes to Life is fairly complicated and, at points, heavily meta. It concerns a factory worker named David Eliade who falls in love with a woman named Veronica Boisson. They conspire to build a bomb together and death, destruction, and redemption follow; along the way, the story's narrator does battle with David for control of the plot. There's a long tradition of rock concept albums that aren't easy to understand, and this one is no exception; but enjoying it doesn't depend on decoding the tale. The record is divided into four separate acts, with a narrative focus that shifts from scene to scene-- a few songs are told from the overarching narrator's perspective, while David's ex-girlfriend, Vivian Benson, offers her side of the story in the album's back half. While a few guest vocalists are employed to help out-- Cults' Madeline Follin and singer/songwriter Jennifer Castle represent Veronica and Vivian, respectively-- the story is largely told by the band's screaming frontman, Damien Abraham, aka Pink Eyes. Taking into account the album's relatively limited range-- almost an hour and a half of straight-up bashing and riffage, with moments like the jangly acoustic figure that opens "A Slanted Tone" as a rare respite-- it becomes apparent that you will need a few listens and a lyric sheet to apprehend David Comes to Life's ambition and follow its labyrinthine storyline. Or, you could just sit back and let the record's dense, visceral blast of guitar squall wash over you. More than any single Fucked Up record, David Comes to Life is thick with walls of noisy melody. It's hard to get a handle on just how many guitar tracks are on a given song, and Shane Stoneback deserves a medal for mixing the sheer bulk of the sound into something so clear. But for all the shoegazey textures and blistering sonic assault, David Comes to Life is also direct and immediate. Hooks are piled on top of hooks, bursting through torrents of spacey noise ("I Was There") and peppy rhythms ("The Recursive Girl") alike. At points, the primal appeal of the blunt and effective riffing even brings to mind the bar-band rock of the Hold Steady....full text |
Fucked Up lyrics
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