Critical Voices: Fucked Up, David’s Town

In a little over a month, Fucked Up will release David Comes to Life, the much-anticipated follow-up to the Toronto-based hardcore group’s Polaris Prize-winning Chemistry of Common Life, which promises to have an even broader appeal than that album’s hardcore crossover: more complex melodies, more ornate arrangements, and more guest appearances.  And it’s a rock opera.

This seems a little unusual for a hardcore group–the punk subgenre is renowned for terse, simple songs with large helpings of screaming. But Fucked Up have never been a group content to play off the standard conventions of their style.  Their vocals may follow in the lineage of At the Drive-In and The Nation of Ulysses, and their politics may be proudly leftist, but their riffs are more classic rock than two-chord punk, and frontman Damian Abraham is a regular, well-tempered guest on Fox News’s Red Eye talk show. That is to say, if any contemporary hardcore group were to embrace the very bombast that punk was born in opposition to, it would be Fucked Up.

David’s Town, released last week on Record Store Day, is not that opera itself, but rather, an example of the group’s dedication to their craft. The eleven tracks here—all written and recorded by Fucked Up and guests—make up a fake “compilation” of first-wave style punk songs by fictional bands from the the fictional 1977 setting of David Comes to Life.

The group’s reenactment of the style of early British punk—think the Buzzcocks, The Jam, The Damned—is impeccable; everything from the album’s mod revival presentation to the kitschy names of the “groups” to the warm, vintage-sounding studio trickery places the album perfectly in the world of Fucked Up’s pending rock opera. The only tip-off of the hardcore group’s involvement here is the guitar. The dense interplay of Mike Haliechuk and Josh Zucker’s axe work on songs like “Garden City” and “It’s Hard to Be a Dad” re-imagine first-wave punk in a post-hardcore world.

And that reimagining is exactly why this seemingly throwaway release—it’s limited to just 2,000 copies and is intended as an addendum to the proper album coming soon—deserves the attention it’s getting. Tracks like “Byrdesdale Spa FC” and “Bull Thunder” are some of the best garage rock songs in a crowded 2011 field, freshening up a genre that has mined the same tropes for far too long. David’s Town is full of technical smarts, and its sense of humor is more palatable than the juvenilia that has long hallmarked the genre it replicates.  But the best news?  The real statement is yet to come.

Voice’s Choices: “Garden City,” “Bull Thunder”