I believe in reading as a creative experience. The Reader comes to the work with their intellect, imagination, expectations, wants and needs, and sets out, consciously or not, to forge their very own “version” of the original text, however sacred. And that “version” will no doubt be different from yours, mine or anyone else’s. As with The Reader, or The Audience Of The Film, Play Or Live Performance, I believe The Listener Of The Album (Or EP) does the same. I also believe in the mighty Fucked Up.
This 2001-founded Toronto collective are often bracketed as “hardcore punk” but there has long been more to it than that. 2021’s epic concept album Year Of The Horse, ostensibly a continuation of their long-running Chinese Horoscope series, proved to be a rock opera (not their first), a prog-punk magnum opus. Now we have their take on Oberon (Tankcrimes) the king of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no less. Pucked Up!
Year Of The Horse’s full title was Year Of The Horse Whose Name Was Perceval (in Four Acts). Their prolific back catalogue is punctuated by Year/s Of The Dog, Pig, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Dragon, Hare and Snake, with the remainder to come, reportedly. And then there’s the acclaimed, conceptual David Comes To Life, a UK-set morality tale, and so much more. Track four of EP Oberon is an instrumental “cover” of Saint-Saens’ ‘(The) Aquarium’, inspired by the French composer’s original, part of his Carnival Of The Animals suite (1886, published only posthumously, in 1922), with its “glissando-like runs and arpeggios”, it says on Wiki. If that’s not Fucked Up, I don’t know what is.
Ambitious, adventurous and fluidly expert, and with (gorgeous) cover artwork by Andrei Bouzikov, the new release from this ever-evolving, collaborative outfit is an instantly accessible delight, capable of pounding into submission any sceptical anti-intellectuals. There’s as much sludge metal as punk, not to mention thrash and intuitively expert post-rock embellishments.
The title track reaches for the primordial and the primitive, even if vocalist Damian Abraham (or is it Oberon himself?), sounds like your dad that time he eerily chanted nonsense rhymes through a gap in the curtain at the school pantomime, weirdly naked from the waist up, a silver-paper crown on his head (questions were asked) – theatrically surreal and sensationally kooky, like Laibach doing The Sound Of Music. It then morphs into a stone-cold sludgy classic before riffing out like Godthrymm or some other superior doom metal merchants (guitars by Mike Haliechuk and Josh Zucker – no Ben Cook again this time).
‘Strix’ follows ‘Oberon’ into the realms of the mythic and the magic, with much blood-drinking, demons and heavenly war, plus a call to “howl the tune that stops your breath”. Then there’s the electro pulse of ‘Mashhit’, another track which is ridiculously well done and passionately mental.
The EP, of course, can be something of an artform in and of itself, and four tracks can sometimes say more than any album could ever aspire to. Oberon is over far too soon, but my advice is to go straight back to the beginning, back into the enchanted primordial forest, where Fucked Up concepts and Fucked Up ideas collide like psychedelic supernovas. At the very heart of it, in the midst of that great conflagration, all things seem possible.
Bring your imagination, your intellect, your expectations. Fucked Up want YOU … and YOU need Fucked Up.
Buy the album here: https://fuckedup.bandcamp.com/album/oberon
9 / 10
CALLUM REID