Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
Reviewed by: Jean-Phillip Guy
I used to love punk. I used to love metal. In my youth, how I longed for a new Bad Religion album, how I screamed for the new Rage Against the Machine. But, somehow, like so many subgenres before, punk became a caricature of itself. How many bands were signed, how many CD’s were released by Epitaph and Fat Wreck Chords, in those days, to cash in on the success of the Green Days and Offsprings of this world? For every punk band with something to sing, with an interesting contribution, you could (and still can, I think), find 15 others that didn’t. What happened to me at that point in time is that I felt like I had listened to every single note, every single emotion, and every single lyric that this particular genre had to offer. Hence I drifted naturally away from it towards genres which I didn’t feel were so constrained. It is then, as usually happens, that I came across something like David Comes to Life.
David Comes to Life is Fucked Up’s third studio album. It’s an ambitious monster of a CD for the 2009 Polaris Prize winners. Raising the bar on themselves, they manage to change what it is to make a hardcore CD. David is an ambitious endeavour that spans the whole of 18 tracks, and while some of the songs are by no means memorable, it boasts enough gems to warrant your attention.
This is a conceptual album. Throughout it we follow various narrators retelling the story of David’s love for Veronica in Thatcherian England. He fears the sound of fate, of this “other shoe” that is bound to drop sooner or later. Tries to deal with this old conundrum, about whether it is better to love and lose, or to love not at all, especially when said love disappears so suddenly. He has to face this in our postmodern, godless vacuity as he struggles with his loss, and relives again, his heart remade, his courage back to put himself again in the path of life. Not filled with regret, but filled with the joy of having lived deeply. In 80 minutes, a rise, a deeper fall, then a higher rise.
On David Comes to Life, Fucked Up moves away from being a traditional hardcore band simply by the breadth of the soundscapes they create. The band’s (to borrow from Chris Polley’s recent Indie Trends) “melodic volatility” is amply demonstrated by their uncanny ability to coax the most they can out of the limited musical range hardcore provides them with. But Pink Eyes’ voice is definitely not volatile: his is a scream that slams you into the ground and takes you back to the roots of this hardcore act. And it is truly in this that David is interesting: At its core, it is a fundamentally dissonant exercise, where music and vocals crash into each other, and nonetheless manage to form an harmonic whole.
“Turn the Season” is an excellent example of how this aerial instrumentation is amplified, somehow, by Pink Eyes’ earthy screams. The same can be said of the breathtaking mid-track solo in “I Was There”, or of the introductions within “Queen of Hearts.” When were people, David and Veronica in this case, more determinately introduced? The bare-chested, balloon-bellied, bald barbarian screaming insanities does not undermine the band’s attempt at a greater musical and lyrical sophistication, but rather emphasizes the statement Fucked Up’s record makes: This is hardcore, now. This can and should be hardcore in the future.
David Comes to Life is a challenging album. Within it lie very pretty songs, covered in muddy screams, lit by sublime arrangements. Fucked Up, in this album as elsewhere, rarely do what you expect them to. Where we should expect anger and darkness, we actually find fierce joy and light. The songs of David remind you of those songs we all polished in the dark when we were young ‘til they shone like diamonds. And they truly will shine if one has the necessary patience. This is one of the rare cases where a band’s ambition for themselves and their own artistic production manages to challenge their genre as a whole.
At some point during David, I was no longer 31: I was 14 and listening to No Control for the first time. Fierce joy, indeed.