Fucked Up - Glass Boys

Fucked Up
Glass Boys
3 June 2014
Matador

4 stars out of 5

 

Glass Boys is Fucked Up’s fourth studio LP, and it finds the Toronto hardcore punk unit as melodically visionary as ever. After the rock opera that was 2011’s excellent David Comes to Life, Fucked Up have got rid of the artifice for a more direct approach on Glass Boys. While still essentially a concept album, it’s a concept album about being Fucked Up, so the band is free (or forced) to just be themselves.

While there’s no immediately-arresting epic like “Son the Father” here, Glass Boys contains its own jewels. “Echo Boomer” opens the album in much the same way as the Mountain opened the Red Viper’s skull. While they’re somewhat troubled about it, Damian Abraham & Co. invite you to sing along on “The Art of Patrons,” as dangerously catchy a tune as “Queen of Hearts.” “Warm Change” sees the band almost jamming, indicating how loose and comfortable they feel on this record. “The Great Divide” is a pop song by Fucked Up’s standards: a three-and-a-half minute explosion of warm melodic embrace, where Abraham makes no bones about directing you to “sing along to this song.”

The album’s title track is also its closer: an epic of changing tempos and melodies, featuring some scalding wit (“there’s a tunnel at the end of the light where you will find me”), and ending with gentle piano meanderings. It’s the kind of song that comes to mind when one thinks of the ideal Fucked Up song. Does this make it almost self-parody? In a way, but since the whole record is about being this band that is called Fucked Up, the lines between the parody and the authentic are blurred at best. Lyotard would be all over this action.

reviewed by Richard Krueger