Fucked Up - Year Of The Rat

(Muso's Guide, March 10, 2009)

Single reviews

A timely release from some very calendar-conscious youngsters, ‘Year Of The Rat’ is here to mark our liberation from the year of the rat, which crashed to its ending on January 25.
Despite being saddled with an altogether offensive and distracting moniker, Fucked Up are more than just needless expletives.

Canadian, but hardcore, so not at all dull, ‘Year Of The Rat’ sees the sextet firstly easing their way atmospherically into an 11-minute guitar and percussion-driven freak out.

As what was known in the old days as an ‘A side’, ‘Year Of The Rat’ is staunchly inaccessible, but tremendously exciting for it, a testosterone-heavy, axe-smothered, drum-engorged epic, with harmonious guitar sounds falling somewhere between Blind Melon and … And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.

Anyway, that’s all good stuff, but there’s an elephant in the middle of this review which needs to be addressed: Fucked Up vocalist Pink Eyes. Not to imply Pink Eyes is an elephant, although clearly an elephant would have more of a grasp of a tuneful vocal, even an elephant who takes up the mic in a hardcore band.

Suffice it to say, you either enjoy the torturous screaming/shouting/anger noise thing, or you’re over 15 years old.

Although it’s been mooted that lyrically ‘Year Of The Rat’ is primarily concerned with political statements and overthrowing the shackles of modern society’s all-pervasive ills, the vocal is unfortunately so mangled so as to prohibit identification of actual subject matter, save for the end quote of a man referring to how the secretary of state told him once “You’d better be prepared to pull the trigger”.

One would assume more Condoleezza Rice than Hillary Clinton because these young beatniks like going head-to-head with cold-blooded Republicans considerably more than with fluffy-wuffy Democrats, regardless of which side will be guaranteed a soundtrack of the devil’s own music in the blazing hereafter.

Musically adept and criminally rocking, there’s a small part of Fucked Up who should be very proud of what they’ve achieved with ‘Year Of The Rat’. Let’s hope they club together for the other part to get some singing lessons.