#5: Fucked Up - David Comes To Life

When I first discovered Fucked Up, I liked them better in concept than execution. This was around six years ago; there was a big buzz about them in the underground hardcore scene, and when they played a show at a small club in Richmond, I decided to go check them out. They were still very obviously a hardcore band at the time, playing in a midtempo style that was significantly slower than the speeds of famous first-wave hardcore bands like Minor Threat and the Bad Brains. Instead, they reminded me of early hardcore bands like Negative Approach and Last Rights, a branch of hardcore that I have always associated with macho meatheadedness. Sure enough, the kids who came to the show were going nuts, and the pit was quite violent.

At the same time, Fucked Up themselves displayed a mischievous intelligence—this was a few months before their first LP, Hidden World, came out, but they were playing a lot of material from that album, and you could already tell that they were chafing at the boundaries imposed on them by the purist underground hardcore scene. Hidden World, when it came out, was a line in the sand for a lot of people. “Flutes? Violins? Seven-minute songs?” said the hardcore massive. “No way, man! Fucked Up suck now.” I’d received a promo of that album in the mail around the time it came out, and if anything, my reaction was the opposite of the typical purist reaction. I was intrigued by their attempts to branch out by drawing out songs and integrating non-punk instrumentation, but I thought their fundamental base of midtempo hardcore was holding them back—three-minute midtempo hardcore songs were boring enough, but seven minutes of the same three-chord riff stretched my patience beyond the breaking point. 

But I wanted to see what Fucked Up would do next. I started reading their blog, on which guitarist Mike Haliechuk used the forum provided him to post intriguing interviews and strange, insightful band-related stories. And for the record, the paragraph in that second link about Thriller Energy Drinks in that entry is a joke, as are all of the references to a lawsuit. The rest of it is real, though. This sort of blurring of the lines between fiction and reality gained Fucked Up a reputation as tricksters, but also made them fascinating to keep up with. And the music was getting better, too—their second LP, 2008’s The Chemistry Of Common Life, was the first Fucked Up album I completely enjoyed from one end to the other, and their 2010 singles compilation, Couple Tracks, was almost entirely awesome as well. There were tons of other releases as well, many of which I never heard. Fucked Up have been a notoriously prolific band since their formation, and in addition to their three major LPs, have released somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 singles and 12 inch EPs. Even if you get both Couple Tracks and their previous singles compilation, 2003’s Epics In Minutes, you’re getting nowhere near the full amount of non-LP tracks they’ve released.

I couldn’t afford to keep up with everything they were releasing, but when I could get their new material, I did. This summer, about a month before they released David Comes To Life, they released Mixtape IV, an honest-to-god cassette tape featuring a whole bunch of live and rare Fucked Up material, plus a two-song promo for the new album and several songs by Fucked Up related side projects, such as drummer Jonah Falco’s band Mad Men and guitarist Ben Cook’s band Young Governor. I ordered the tape almost as soon as it was available, and received it in the mail at least two weeks before David Comes To Life’s release date. I’d long since gone from thinking Fucked Up were a good concept whose execution needed improvement to considering them a truly good band, but Mixtape IV nonetheless pushed my fandom to a new level. The tape deck in my car broke this fall, but this summer it was still working, and I drove around for weeks listening to that Fucked Up tape over and over again.

By the time David Comes To Life came out, I had every between-song interview snippet memorized. I really wanted to hear the new album, and I’d been unsuccessful at locating a free download of it before its release date. So when Matador Records put the mp3 version of David Comes To Life on sale at midnight on its release date for $3.99, with the price increasing by a few cents every minute until it hit full price at noon, I took the unprecedented step of purchasing the mp3s, which cost me $4.06 at 12:05 AM. I’m opposed on principle to paying for mp3s; the format is so low in quality and so easily destroyed that it doesn’t seem to me that it should be worth much more than nothing. That said, at 18 songs I was paying something like 20 cents an mp3, and it felt worth it to me at that moment just to be able to hear the album without waiting.

David Comes To Life took a while longer to fully penetrate my consciousness than Mixtape IV had. I continued driving around listening to the mixtape, and while I would sometimes put on the album while I was at the computer, I didn’t usually sit there for long enough to play through its entire 78 minute length. After a couple of months, I realized that I only knew the first five songs or so. My solution to this was to burn it to a CD-R and put it in the stack of CDs beside the boombox in my bedroom. That worked—before long I was listening to it regularly while cleaning or reading, or before bedtime. And as I worked my way farther into the album, I found that every new song I learned from it was just as catchy as the ones I’d known before.

I also started to realize that David Comes To Life wasn’t just a loosely-connected series of songs that had been billed as a concept album in order to give it a marketing hook. This was one long story, a story of love, loss, and free will. A brilliantly bizarre post by Mike Haliechuk on the Fucked Up blog did a song-by-song comparison between David Comes To Life and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, and while it was hard to take that post entirely seriously, it did shed a lot of light on the specifics of David Comes To Life’s plot. 

I don’t want to spend too long on this, but I’ll attempt to quickly summarize: David Eliade works at a lightbulb factory in the fictional English town of Byrdesdale, sometime in the late 70s. He meets Veronica Boisson on the steps of the factory when she hands him a flyer protesting working conditions at the factory. David and Veronica fall in love, and start dating, but one day, when she’s waiting to meet up with David at the factory, a bomb planted by some of the more radical members of her protest group explodes, killing Veronica. David survives the explosion but is wracked with guilt, because he realizes that Veronica was only there because of him. He begins to rail against the tyranny of love, that it could ruin his life this way, and questions whether he’d somehow deserved the suffering he was now experiencing, whether his belief in love had merited this sort of retribution. There’s some implication that he does indeed deserve this, as if the story is being narrated from a cynical viewpoint that denies the idea of true love as a legitimate concept that’s worth believing in.

At this point, a third character steps in: Vivian Benson, who witnessed the explosion, and has information David hasn’t been privy to. She points out that the narrator, Octavio St. Laurent, has been abusing his godlike privileges, letting his judgments of the characters infect what is supposed to be a neutral relation of the story. This is when David “comes to life,” rebelling against his position as a mere character in the story and battling Octavio for control of the way he is portrayed. During their battle, Octavio realizes that, far from being the godlike controller of the story, he’s really just another character in it, and not truly free to do whatever he wants after all. This realization weakens Octavio, and David takes control of the narrative entirely, vindicating his own belief in love and expressing a sincere happiness that he’d ever gotten to spend time with Veronica at all. In the final song on the album, “Lights Go Up,” he has seized the narrative voice, telling the audience to “empty the theatre, rush through the door, start living the life you never could before.” Realizing that the story is at an end, he proclaims his joy that the story will soon begin again and he’ll be reunited with Veronica once more. (For more details, the lyrics can be found here.)

OK, so, pretty intense stuff, huh? But the album doesn’t need that context to be enjoyed, and in fact, I had gotten to know pretty much all of the songs as pieces of music before I even started to learn the words. David Comes To Life is incredibly cohesive, even by the standards of a typical concept album/”rock opera,” and is written to flow together both lyrically and musically. The most obvious example of the musical connection is the way “Remember My Name” begins with a slightly altered version of the same riff that ended the previous song, “Running On Nothing.”

But even more important than these connecting threads is the level of high-quality songwriting that is sustained over the course of this entire album. Fucked Up, as I mentioned before, are a notoriously prolific band, and in fact, they wrote over 30 songs in connection with this album. Eight more songs that have some bearing on the plot of David Comes To Life were released on five different 7 inch singles, and there’s also an 11-song LP called David’s Town that presents itself as a compilation of songs by different local bands from Byrdesdale that were active at the time the story takes place. Of course, all of the songs are by members of Fucked Up in different configurations—and for the record, all of the songs are really good. “Do You Feed?” by Animal Man, aka Ben, Mike and Jonah, was included on Mixtape IV, and might be my favorite track on there. It’s hard to even pick which songs are my favorites from David Comes To Life though, since they’re all so excellent. Standouts include “Queen Of Hearts,” an incredible love song with guest vocals by Madeline Follin of Cults, playing the part of Veronica, and “Truth We Know,” which includes an acoustic guitar intro that is quickly absorbed into a much more powerful tune, but the intrinsic melody of which is retained throughout the song. But really, if I try to single out particularly catchy choruses, or powerful lyrical sentiments, or hard-hitting riffs, I’m doomed, because by those criteria, there’s a reason to mention every song on here.

When I was younger and more heavily involved in the hardcore punk scene, there was a pretty serious ideological split within the scene. And I don’t mean something that related to politics—there were plenty of those, too, but this one was strictly along musical lines. Some people believed that if a band came out of the punk scene and/or the hardcore scene (I always thought of the two as different facets of the same basic thing, but this also is a debatable assertion in some circles), they were obligated to stay within certain lines. Accusations of “selling out” got thrown around a lot back then, and I always thought there was something to the idea that bands should stay part of the independent community and avoid the horrible business practices of major labels. I was of the post-Steve Albini “they’re gonna rip you off, you’ll do better on an indie” school of thought, and I feel like I’ve been vindicated in that stance by the fact that these days, a band can sell a million copies and win a Grammy while avoiding any affiliation with a major label.

But back in those days, you used to see people calling bands “sellouts” even when they were still part of the independent community, just because their sound didn’t fall within certain sonic guidelines that were seen as punk or as hardcore by certain people within the scene. I remember people calling Fugazi sellouts because of albums like Red Medicine and End Hits, which is ridiculous to anyone who is aware of Fugazi’s ethics. Anyway, the point I’m driving at here is that to me, what Fucked Up are doing musically still seems to this day like punk rock. I know there are plenty of hardcore purists who abandoned them five years ago or longer who would disagree with me. Plenty of the kids who were in the audience at that 2006 club show probably wouldn’t even deign to listen to David Comes To Life. But if you ask me, they’re missing out.

First of all, there’s no way any band with Damien Abraham on vocals is going to sound clean, polished, or mainstream-friendly. The dude spends this entire album screaming, and I for one think it’s great. The contrast between loud but melodic guitar riffs and screamed vocals for me evokes a particular kind of emotion, a feeling of being torn between anger and pain, between frustration and sadness, that is all too familiar in my life. This was the sound that got me so excited about emocore in the late 80s and early 90s, that made me want to spend years of my life listening to Rites Of Spring, Dag Nasty, Still Life, Current, Indian Summer, and plenty of other bands whose music is still really important to me 15 years later.

Musically, Fucked Up contrasts Abraham’s screamed vocals with chunky, distorted, yet melodic riffing that is far more reminiscent of late 70s UK punk bands than of emocore. In the liner notes to Mixtape IV, Mike Haliechuk makes multiple references to specific Fucked Up songs sounding like The Undertones, and I also hear The Jam, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and Stiff Little Fingers in the sound of these songs, as well as more modern melodic punk bands like Husker Du, Leatherface, and maybe even Hot Water Music. This is a long way from sounding like Last Rights and Negative Approach, but the sound of Fucked Up is still deeply embedded within the punk rock tradition.

And despite the fact that that tradition now stretches back over 35 years, Fucked Up are making a solid contribution to it with this album. If anything, Haliechuk’s Undertones comparisons overstate the case. David Comes To Life doesn’t sound like a rehash of older bands and older styles—the purist punks might be happier with it if it did, but it’d be a far less good album. What’s more, the lyrics certainly aren’t anything that’s been done before; their multi-leveled storyline and vivid, literate imagery demonstrate a fierce intelligence and creative energy at the heart of Fucked Up. I’m not sure where they’ll go from here, but even if the darkest rumors I’m hearing about an imminent breakup turn out to be true, the brilliant statement they’ve made here will ensure their legacy as one of the best bands to come out of the hardcore scene so far this century.