Sun rises above the factory but the rays don't make it to the street. Through the gates come the employees, beaten down and dragging their feet. A group of lefties hand out pamphlets to the workers coming in. For two people on the pavement life will never be the same again. When she placed it in his hand, people must have seen the sparks. Neither understands what just happened to their hearts.
That's the opening line of "Queen of Hearts," the first song (besides a musical overture) on Montreal hardcore band Fucked Up's third album, David Comes To Life. The album is a rock opera about a factory worker named David who falls in love with a leftist activist named Veronica who gets killed by a bomb, and…uh…there's a dude named Octavio…and…OK, so the story is hard to follow, but then again Tommy didn't make any sense, either, and that didn’'t stop it from being an amazing album. Whatever the actual narrative of the story is meant to be, what gets translated across the album’s 18 songs and 68 minutes is a tale of love, loss, despair, and mourning. It’s an album of emotional intensity that is my favorite album of the year, and an album that has resonated with me more than anything in a long, long time.
David Comes To Life is by no means a perfect album. It drags in the middle, there are some clunky couplets, and the songs aren’t as consistently great as on their last album, 2008’s The Chemistry of Modern Life. Hardcore fans will no doubt be disappointed by David Comes To Life‘s more rock-oriented direction. The songs are slower, more melodic, and there are even a few ballads. It sounds like a punk band covering a classic rock band--“Running On Nothing” could be a Bruce Springsteen song. I saw them open for Trash Talk, and Trash Talk blew them away from a punk perspective. Fucked Up lack the ferocity, anger, and violence of hardcore. In its place, they have emotional complexity and intensity, which makes their music much more interesting and enduring than your average thrash band. It’s easy to write a song about why people suck or how the system sucks. It’s much, much harder to write a song that deals with the aftermath of losing a loved one, and pondering whether it would have been better to have lived a life of solitude rather than loved and lost.
Article comments
1 - Joe Cornelisse
Hey Patrick...Fucked Up are from Toronto not Montreal...great research
Joe Cornelisse-SSGS
2 - Patrick Taylor
Well, I got the country right. Thank you for pointing out my inadequacies as an editor and researcher.
3 - Costello
Classly name for a band
4 - Patrick Taylor
I'm sure it was super funny when they were 20 and playing basements. Now that they are in their thirties and would like their name to be actually printable, it's probably not so funny anymore. A lot of media sources have issues with even putting F-D Up. Lesson learned: name you band carefully.