The Chemistry Of Common Life

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

It's never too late to reinvent hardcore. It was a half-decade old when Husker Du recorded 1984's Zen Arcade, an album so ambitious it made you laugh out loud — even harder when you realized it made good on those ambitions. So here comes Fucked Up, a young Toronto sextet that takes the idea of hardcore being flexible, not stringent, as its guiding principle. The band's Matador debut, The Chemistry of Common Life, has as outsized a scope as Zen, only instead of exploding genre convention by attaching them to the hoary notion of a concept album, Fucked Up does it more literally, making nearly every guitar, drumbeat and guttural vocal ambush sound like an explosion. This is that punk rarity, a headphones album, gloriously produced in the sense that everything from the three guitars' squalls to the crags in huge, hugely charismatic frontman Pink Eyes' many, many utterances of "BRRAAOOOUUUGGGHH" is captured in vivid aural color — a sonic mass that recalls yet another band that reinvented hardcore, Japan's Boredoms.

The songs, then, have a lot to live up to, and they do. Cuts like "No Epiphany," "Magic Word" and "The Chemistry of Common Life" would shine through even if they'd been recorded with tin can and string. Here they sound like epics in miniature. Quiet moments like "Golden Seal" and "Looking for God" act as warmly lit long-shot scenes where the cavemen and women forage peacefully through their desolate, brutal climate between brontosaur and wildebeest attacks. Fucked Up isn't leaving hardcore behind, it's taking hardcore with it — by force, which is the best and only way to do it.