When punk rose up in England around 1976-78, one of its
purposes was to slay the grandiose, out-of-touch, silly beast that progressive
rock had become. I’m not so sure that punk killed prog (it was never anywhere
near the level of commercial force as prog, especially in the states), but the
fact of the matter is that punk endured while prog went into an extended
hibernation. A few bands such as Porcupine Tree attempted to revive the
disgraced genre in the ‘90s, with mixed success.
Then, around the turn of the century, prog became a little
less uncool. Critics started reevaluating bands like Yes and Gentle Giant. The
post-hardcore powerhouse At the Drive-In morphed into The Mars Volta,[1]
a band that redefined musical excess for the twenty-first century, releasing
between one and three great albums in the process, depending on who you ask.[2]
Suddenly it was acceptable for punks to admit that they liked King Crimson or
Hawkwind.
Enter Fucked Up, the Canadian hardcore band that has written
punk songs with an increasingly prog sensibility over the past decade. Their
earliest singles, most of which were collected on the great Epics in Minutes (2004), mostly consisted
of great if fairly boilerplate, short and fast hardcore tunes. But they began
stretching out once they started toying with the long player format. Their
debut album Hidden World shows right
away that the band had changed its stripes with the terrific opener “Crusades,”
which clocks in at almost seven minutes. The last track “Vivian Girls” is
nearly ten.
The band’s first masterpiece, The Chemistry of Common Life (2008), doesn’t have any songs quite
as long as “Vivian Girls,” but they had stretched their sound to allow for
songs to have multiple movements, soaring backup vocals, and more melodic
guitar work. They pushed their new melodic sensibilities even further on David Comes to Life (2011), an honest to
god rock opera centered on the love between two young people in late 70s England.
As a result, Fucked Up might be the first hardcore band that has ever had the
ambition or hubris—you can decide which—to try to make a record in the vein of Tommy.
The band’s three albums have (somewhat understandably)
gotten most of the attention, but their best outlet for their proggiest
impulses can be found in their series of Zodiac Singles. Since 2006, they’ve
released five 12” singles, beginning with Year
of the Dog and continuing on through Year
of the Pig, Rat, Ox, and Tiger. They’ve been sitting on Year
of the Hare for a while, and they just premiered the title track from Year of the Dragon at a show in New York
this past Saturday.
“Year of the Dog” and “Year of the Pig” both have the band starting
to find their way within greatly elongated song formats. The nine-minute “Year
of the Dog” is just as effective is most of the material on Hidden World, and its shorter b-side “Last
Man Standing” has the band mining similar territory as well. Two years later
the band bit off more than it could chew with “Year of the Pig,” which doesn’t
quite justify its eighteen minute runtime. Having to occasionally plod along in
order to fill time is not a good look, so the band curbed its ambitions a bit
for the shorter (eleven minutes) “Year of the Rat” the year after. The results
are astounding. “Rat” is the band mining their gift for the epic more completely
than they have in almost any time of their career, and Pink Eyes’ lyrics are
some of his career best. The b-side “First
Born” is also great, transforming from a kind of punk blues into the triumphant
sounds that they did so well on The Chemistry
of Common Life over the course of six minutes.
“Year of the Ox” marked something of a turning point for the
Zodiac Singles, as the song is much more melodic than anything in the series
before it—not too much of a surprise seeing as it came out while the band was
working on David Comes to Life. The
thirteen minute song prominently features a violin, which isn’t exactly an
instrument that screams punk, but the band makes it work excellently within the
context. Even more surprisingly, if you flip the record over to “Solomons Song,”
you’re greeted by a solo saxophone intro, and there is an extended sax, drums, bass
breakdown in the middle of the song that is unlike anything I’ve ever heard a
punk band try. That it all works is something of a minor miracle. They pushed
even further away from the punk template on the piano-driven “Year of the Tiger,”
which aside from Pink Eye’s never-changing hardcore bark doesn’t sound much
like the work of a punk band at all.[3]
The band also shows that they’re more ready for “Year of the Pig” length songs
at this point in their career, as “Tiger” clocks in at 15:29 and the synthy
instrumental b-side “ONNO” chugs along for an absurd twenty-two minutes.
From the sound of the video recorded at Le Poisson Rouge on
Saturday, “Year of the Dragon” ratchets back up the volume and intensity that
was missing from “Ox” and “Tiger.” This is only fitting for a song meant to
channel the fearsomeness of the only mythical creature on the Chinese zodiac. Fortunately,
the video and audio quality aren’t bad at all, and they more than ably fill a
quarter hour with several distinct movements.
When they finally finish the Zodiac Singles series—if the
band is to be believed about being done with Year of the Hare and Year of
the Dragon they should have five left to record—it wouldn’t be surprising
if they put together some kind of vinyl box set collecting all twelve records.[4]
If they do, I hope they get Roger Dean to do the cover art. His visual style
isn’t quite in line with Fucked Up’s music, but considering the ambition and the
prog-leanings of this project, Dean would be a perfect choice. The Complete Zodiac Singles could be the
band’s Tales from Topographic Oceans,
although the Chinese Zodiac is a much better overarching concept than
pretension, which is what Yes went for with that album.[5]
The link between the two bands is still fitting though. Punk
has been a frequently dogmatic genre and culture throughout its nearly forty
years, from the resistance of many early eighties hardcore fans to change, to
the more intense segments of the straight-edge movement, but Fucked Up has
managed to find their place as one of the most highly regarded bands in punk
today through the most unlikely of means. Fucked Up found their own form of
post-hardcore by circling back to the music punk was designed to destroy.
[1] Well,
At the Drive-In’s members split apart to found the Mars Volta and Sparta, but
we don’t like to talk about Sparta.
[2] I’ll
personally stand behind De-Loused in the
Comatorium, The Bedlam in Goliath
and about half of Frances the Mute.
[3]
Shades of several bands (Husker Du, The Replacements, etc.) moving away from
punk and toward more straight ahead rock in the mid-eighties.
[4]
The cost of this size box set would probably necessitate it being a limited for-diehards-only
type of thing. A Record Store Day exclusive seems possible.
[5]
Disclaimer: I actually like Tales from
Topographic Oceans, but I’ll freely admit that it is one of the high
watermarks for seventies prog excess, up there with almost every bit of
overblown nonsense Emerson, Lake & Palmer ever put out.
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