Totally Fucked Up

Fucked Up (w/ Let's Wrestle, Geoffrey Oi!cutt)
Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, UK (18 Nov 2008)

I've been mightily impressed by Fucked Up's new full-length The Chemistry Of Common Life. A worthy follow-up to Hidden World, it keeps taking hardcore just where it should be heading: towards increasing ambition in songwriting, arrangement, melody, and nuance, yet with a sturdy backbone of three guitars (the fat, crunching humbucker sound of Gibson Les Pauls and SGs) alternating between monster riffage and soaring guitar-only breaks. So I hit their show with no low expectations. Those high expectations were filled thoroughly, and then some.

The venue forms an apt setting: a slightly scruffy and spare working man's club with cheap beer, red velvet benches lining the walls, and a stage barely large enough to accommodate the six-strong band. Well, except that the vocalist Pink Eyes spends a total of about a song and a half of the entire set on stage. The rest of the time, he prowls the audience shirtless, standing up on railings or (most of the time, actually) carrying young moshers who jump on his back, grab the microphone to shout a couple of lines from the lyrics, and then hand the microphone back nicely. When he on occasion loses the microphone in the audience, band mates kick another mic stand in his direction, he grabs the mic, and continues his gruff vocalizing. (If the band have stamina to play a 12-hour gig, as they did earlier this fall to celebrate their record's release, they'll have no problem maintaining full steam for 90 minutes.)

The band is exceptionally tight, and the audience is no less passionate about the night's proceedings. I was too busy to take pictures, instead spending the show with a big grin on my face, smashing the floor with my foot. A dozen younger kids get an active most pit going but stay well-behaved -- no one's out to hurt others but only to have a good time. The high points are many, but include especially "Black Albino Bones," "Baiting The Public," and "Crusades." I'd have to say that even in a year full of good, engaging gigs, this is the most fun and exhilarating show I've seen all year since Les Savy Fav (whose singer Tim Harrington is a similar wild shaved-head bearded bear of a man on stage) last April. Also check out Fucked Up's tourblog.

The openers are interesting in their ways. Geoffrey Oi!cutt are an (you guessed it) Oi! punk band from Leeds who've apparently been buddies with Fucked Up for a good while. They feature a singer in cricket uniform with a cricket bat, singing proudly of Yorkshire and covering a tune each by Angelic Upstarts and Cockney Rejects. But, frankly, their sound is too revivalist for this context.

Let's Wrestle are a young trio from London who are not unlike Television Personalities in featuring poppy or even twee melodies and a sprightly, burring guitar backbone, sprinkled with Pavement-ish elements. The band seems a little disengaged, though, wondering aloud between songs what to play next. This somewhat blunts the hooks of charming tunes like "I Wish I Was In Husker Du" (Myspace). But I quite enjoyed them nonetheless.