Year: 2006
Country: Canada
City: Toronto
Label: Deranged
Format: CD, 2 x LP
Tracks: 12
Time: 72 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Prog Punk
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"the chemistry of common life"
Year: 2008
Label: Matador
Format: CD, 2 x LP
Tracks: 12
Time: 40 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Prog Punk
Year: 2011
Label: Matador
Format: CD, 2 x LP
Tracks: 18
Time: 60 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Prog Punk
"glass boys"
Year: 2014
Label: Matador
Format: CD, LP
Tracks: 10
Time: 40 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Prog Punk
"dose your dreams"
Year: 2018
Label: Merge
Format: CD, 2 x LP
Tracks: 18
Time: 60 min.
Genre: rock
Style: Prog Punk
The art-hardcore band’s fifth album is a dynamic departure for the group, a long, psychedelic, concept-heavy odyssey that dips into many genres along the way. Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham has made a career on a being a bit much: The Canadian punk recently produced an extreme wrestling documentary called Bloodlust and looks like he could get in the ring himself, particularly when the burly, bearded, and frequently shirtless frontman of Fucked Up smashes bottles over his head on stage. He always sings like he’s trying to exfoliate his larynx with loose pieces of his ribcage and they’re the most abrasive vocals anyone will encounter from a band putting out records on Merge. Glass Boys, from 2014, represented Abraham’s purist vision of Fucked Up, a punk rock teleology that traced DIY ethics back to the ancient Greeks and had more guitar overdubs than a Smashing Pumpkins album.
Yet, compared to the band’s double-album rock operas and wooly Zodiac EPs, Glass Boys was a model of hardcore austerity, and its mild reception felt like a referendum on guitarist Mike Haliechuk ceding his artistic control. The line on Fucked Up is that they’ve been expanding the horizons of hardcore, even though it’s a genre they’ve bore little resemblance to, starting with their 2006 debut Hidden World. At this point, it’s clear that Fucked Up are part of the indie rock orthodoxy and everything that made Fucked Up a critical sensation—the saxophones, disco beats, not-all-hardcore genre experiments, and the adventures of David Eliade—are back with a vengeance on Dose Your Dreams.
It begins by recasting the titular character from their 2011 opus, David Comes To Life. Once a budding revolutionary stuck in a lightbulb factory risking it all in the name of love, David inexplicably begins the ambitious Dose Your Dreams as a drugged-up white collar schlub who quits his job on the very first song (”None of Your Business Man”). Minutes later, he meets an elderly mystic named Joyce who guides him through a psychotropic vision quest that challenges his perceptions of reality and vaguely resembles The Matrix, I guess. The plot of Dose Your Dreams could be sussed out like a Magic Eye image if you glance at the titles for long enough (“Living in a Simulation,” “Joy Stops Time,” “How To Die Happy,” “I Don’t Wanna Live in This World”), but anyone who can retell it from memory is either in Fucked Up or read the press release (*Review by Ian Cohen ).
