Fucked Up
Year Of The Snake
(Tankcrimes)
By this point, if you have already indulged in the Zodiac series from Fucked Up then you know what Year Of The Snake has to offer your eardrums. You would know that the mercurial Toronto hardcore punk outfit is not particularly fond of crafting conventionally structured or listener friendly music, and in the mind of a rabid fan base, they’ve earned every indulgence. But how fucked up is too fucked up?
The eighth album in the Zodiac series, Year Of The Snake is a record in two tracks. The first title track is upwards of 24-minutes, opening with a gentle woodwind before breaking into spastic bursts of hardcore punk, abrasive guitars and savage vocals. Back and forth, the song progresses in movements, reprising the woodwinds, evocative of Native American/First Nation tribal instrumentation before lashing out. The second track, “Passacaglia” is more conventional (if anything Fucked Up does can be labeled as such) in terms of length and construct, a six-minute nugget of straight forward, seventies rock influenced psyche jams. Then the whole record is over.
If Fucked Up is anything, it’s a laboratory of experimentation, and a prolific one at that. Their track record speaks to a complicated, satisfying place in the pantheon of art rock. Since 2006, they’ve recorded a massive list of albums, EPs and singles; in 2009 they won the Polaris Prize, the pinnacle for a Canadian band. Their studio is a hive of innovation, which itself holds significant appeal for me as a fan of chance taking music. While I like the sounds on “Year Of The Snake” and covet their jammy aesthetic on “Passacaglia” none of it gives me what I need to latch onto. None of it really rounds into shape like their more conventional (there is that word again) second album The Chemistry Of Common Life which has achieved an almost canonical place in music. A whole album of each sound? That I would dig into over and over, but as a thirty-odd minute capsule, the landmarks sought on Year Of The Snake are a step beyond my taste.
