February 22, 2008

Fucked Up

Year Of The Pig

Reasons to love Fucked Up: They’re called Fucked Up. They’ve had members named Mustard Gas and, um, Concentration Camp. They truly embody hardcore by releasing records on their own terms, showing scant regard for the machinations of the record industry. They’re influenced by Spanish anarchists. Many of their gigs end in bloodshed or carnage or both or worse. MTV Canada had to resort to introducing them as ‘Effed Up’. They’ve taken out lawsuits against Camel and Rolling Stone. Their first singer was demoted after missing shows for punching a police officer who stole his ham sandwich. None of them know how to tune a guitar. They’ve made a festive song with Faris Rotter, Black Lips and Nelly fucking Furtado.
And they’ve just released this 18-minute opus. By turns plodding, beautiful, melancholic, stratospheric, manic, jazz-swing and doom-hardcore, it’s got bongos that sound like they’re being beaten at the hands of a cracked-out subway dweller at sanity’s city limits. It’s got soft coos from guest vocalist Jennifer Castle sparring with growls straight out of Hades courtesy of Pink Eyes, aka Damian Abraham. It’s one big long headfuck of chaos that begins with organs like Led Zep’s ‘No Quarter’ and ends whipping a krautrock donkey into the sunset while gleefully pissing self indulgence on hardcore’s own boundaries. Did we mention it’s 18 minutes long?
‘Year Of The Pig’ builds effortlessly with visions of impaled piggies bleeding to death on the abbatoir floor. The imagery might be grotesque and the music hellish, but there’s tips of tongues in cheeks here while fists down throats are forcing retches of a thousand bile-coated ideas. They’ve even cut the song down to five minutes for those with porcine attention spans. But who’s fucked up enough to want that?

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