FUCKED UP - David Comes To Life

The Canadian sextet Fucked Up, whose members' names are hidden behind creative nicknames (Gulag, 10.000 Eyes, Mustard Gas, etc.), after putting forward the innovative idea of "symphonic" progressive hardcore, after churning out Eps, breathtaking singles and revolutionary mini-cds, after crafting two albums like "Hidden World" and "Chemistry Of Common Life", arrives at the capital-letter rock opera of "David Comes To Life", in four acts, derived and expanded precisely from the eponymous track on "Hidden World".

The story verbosely tells of the misunderstood David, a worker in a lightbulb factory in a remote (and imaginary) small town, who one day meets a rebellious girl for whom he loses his head. The girl dies in a reprisal, and David is suspected of having something to do with her death. The challenge of proving his innocence becomes the challenge of coming to terms with loss, and finally rediscovering the desire to love and the feeling for life. The four acts are thus cycles of songs linked to one another but constantly shifting, somewhere between stream of consciousness and pop songs with catchy, anguished choruses at once, carved out by the voice and by the interplay of the three guitars, never so sharp and deafening.

The first act is instantly brilliant. The genesis unfolds like a descent from the sky, in a cloud of reverb and piano notes, a melody that takes shape and picks up speed little by little, until it finds the right gear and becomes the launchpad for "Queen Of Hearts", an anxiety-inducing duet between a Springsteen-esque outburst and an angelic female voice. "Under My Nose", a fast-paced emo-pop track, twisted by jangling guitar chimes, is one of their best illusionistic tricks, between wall of sound and triumphant progression. Likewise "The Other Shoe", a metaphysical, almost rapturous Henry Rollins, is a recitative with a two-way refrain-motto, which then shoots off into a crescendo of chaos, and the statement of "Turn The Season" tears through a torpedo-riff, in the best tradition of Husker Du.

The second act kicks off with another composite riff ("Running On Nothing", another peak of the album), with southern hard-rock overtones, turned into a lacerating confession, and "Remember My Name", which — together with "The Other Shoe" — approaches the visceral quality of "Tommy" in its combination of instrumental machine-gun bursts and constant loud-quiet modulation. "Serve Me Right" is the closest to the canonical ethos of hardcore, even though the roaring fury of the overtone guitars and the atmospheric joints in the background help launch it into a different orbit.

In the third act, the narrative arrives at its role as absolute protagonist; genres, songs and production choices become subordinate to it. The power-ballad of "Truth I Know" hooks the enraged vocal to an oboe-like effect from the third guitar, and in "Ship Of Fools" — even better — the band becomes, in unison, the official storyteller of post-hardcore. The peak of ferocity of "A Little Death", which makes the Sex Pistols look like diligent schoolkids, adds a baroque coda (perhaps the only unhealthy idea of the whole work).

The fourth act does the opposite of the third, putting everything into the guitar assault and its hallucinogenic implications, a cathartic force with respect to the protagonist's journey. "I Was There" is a catalogue of verbal and instrumental chasms, explosions and acid orgasms at a hard-rock pace, "Inside A Frame" is a slam-dance that starts out melodic only to turn into a relentless statement in the vein of Rage Against The Machine or Refused, built up through rhythmic layers of guitars, and "The Recursive Girl" is a breathless "Serve Me Right". For the closing, Fucked Up adopt genre twists: "One More Night" picks up "The Other Shoe" and "Remember My Name", but is even more programmatic and demanding, turning almost folk-rock as it approaches the reappearance of the female voice, and "Lights Go Up" distorts the Byrds' jangle-pop to the point of caricature (at an easy tempo), with an almost sung opening that then spreads out into a layer of post-shoegaze sound.

More than the youthful vignettes of the Descendents' "Milo Goes To College", the album — also presented as a theatrical recital and preceded by the mini-album "David's Town" — is a hymn to the great double albums of the past, the ones that repeat themselves to exhaustion, song after song, but which actually keep digging deeper into themselves until they reach catharsis. Fucked Up lean heavily on the concept of ludos, and of light, of the lightbulb, in the same solemn, lofty tone of preachers when they insist on metaphors to mystically stun their audience. Flawless in hooking the sonic montage to the narrative, meticulous in organizing its spaces: overbearing in the instrumental ones, excessive in the vocal ones, unafraid of falling into verbosity (yet another element that makes it thick, dense, profound). It's a new stronghold, a new boundary marker, a stake that takes root in the lacerating primal force of Husker Du's "Zen Arcade", especially in those psychedelic interludes that rub the songs raw into voids of existential panic, revealing a kind of inner outer space. Recorded in four studios over the span of three years, with the whole band supervising. Immortalized live on "David Comes to Live" (2022), a recording from November 2011 in Brooklyn.

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20/06/2011