A band apart but still together
In isolation, F--ked Up made some of its best work yet
F--ked Up has spent more than 15 years pushing the limits of what it means to identify as a “punk” or “hardcore” band. The logical next step was to obliterate the very idea of what F--ked Up itself means as a band.
It wasn’t completely intentional, perhaps, but that’s how it worked out during the making of the acclaimed Toronto sextet’s ludicrously ambitious new double-LP “rock opera,” Dose Your Dreams.
It’s some of the best work the band has ever produced, even if they were rarely in the same room together during its long production.
F--ked Up has a well-documented reputation for fractious internal dynamics, yet it is still a band in the traditional sense, one that will reunite for a hometown show at the Horseshoe Tavern on Oct. 19 before hitting the road in earnest in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Europe and Australia.
The old gang has got a lot of rehearsing to do before then. Frontman Damian Abraham, who’s notably absent from about one-third of this 90-minute epic’s 18 songs, barely touched down in the studio while the opus was being made.
Guitarist and resident mad genius Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco spent a good year in and out of recording sessions figuring out what this thing was going to be on their own before anyone else joined the party.
Even then, Haliechuk says, Abraham would only come in to do his vocals “every couple of weeks,” while guitarist Ben Cook sings just one song and contributes to a couple of others; bassist Sandy Miranda recorded her parts in her own home studio; and “we realized very late” that guitarist Josh Zanger “didn’t play on it at all,” despite11th-hour pleas that he “come in and play one triangle note just so you can be on it.”
Beyond that, it took a vastly expanded cast of characters to bring Haliechuk’s widescreen vision for
Dose Your Dreams to life, including fellow past Polaris Music Prize winners Lido Pimienta and Owen Pallett; idiosyncratic local singer/songwriters Jennifer Castle, John Southworth and Mary
Margaret O’Hara; J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr.; California singer/songwriter Miya Folick; and fellow Toronto punk Ryan Tong.
“For the first year, it was just me and Jonah,” Haliechuk confirms. “He lives in England now, but every three or four months he would have to come over for some reason and we’d book a week in the studio. The first session was two weeks and we wrote close to 20 songs — with no plans, just a cheque for the studio — and they all sounded different.
“And we were taking breaks from writing punk songs just because I record guitar in a space that’s like this big, maybe” — he spreads his arms to represent the width of a walk-in closet, basically — “and I’m in there by myself, with huge amps everywhere on every wall, and it’s just physically exhausting. So I would try to find a way to write in our control room and hook a bass up right to the computer or play with a drum machine just to give myself a little place to breathe, and then we just started writing differently.”
Eventually, Haliechuk and Falco committed to making an even more all-in exercise in prog-punk maximalism than 2008’s Polaris-winning shoegazer-hardcore classic The Chemistry of Common Life or 2011’s David Comes to Life, the latter of which was actually F--ked Up’s first crack at a Who-esque rock opera.
This particular opera revives F--ked Up favourite go-to fictional protagonist/ revolutionary David Eliade — now a miserable desk jockey in a corporate job — as a narrative device to tether Dose Your Dreams’ dizzying stylistic experimentation, but propels him on a hallucinatory odyssey into the nature and meaning of existence itself that fully befits the psychedelic territory covered over the work’s four sides.
The seer who sends him on his way is named Joyce and that’s totally fitting, because Dose Your Dreams is the Ulysses of the F--ked Up catalogue, a work of art that unapologetically demands a deep intellectual and temporal investment from its consumers. The record goes so far beyond punk into full-on Pink Floyd liftoff, crunching industrial techno, Primal Scream narco-disco, luminescent Krautrock and even crunchy bubblegum-pop sweetness that it seems silly that we still refer to F--ked Up as a hardcore band, even though F--ked Up onstage is still kind of the ultimate hardcore band. Oddly enough, too, the man who used to put the words into David Eliade’s mouth isn’t the voice speaking through David anymore. Abraham, busy with hosting his Viceland TV series The Wrestlers, ceded the lyrical reins to Haliechuk this time out.
“This was the only way it would have worked,” Abraham says. Despite doing interviews separately from Haliechuk, he was about to interview his old friend for his Turned Out a Punk podcast.
“There’s always been an insecurity for me about making sure my voice was there on the records, especially if I was going to be the one singing. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t like Mike’s lyrics or didn’t like Mike’s songs; it was just that they weren’t mine,” Abraham says. “(But) I think I was able to let go of that because Mike had worked so hard on it and I was doing something that I was really passionate about at the same time, and so I was able to just become, like, a band member as opposed to the bandleader.”
It was Abraham who convinced F--ked Up that it should retreat to a far leaner and more traditional idea of punk on 2014’s underrated Glass Boys, thinking he might also be done with the band for good in the process. But Haliechuk graciously gives him credit for the whole Dose Your Dreams concept in hindsight.
“A lot’s been said about me and Damian and our places in this drama, but the idea for this record sort of happened after Glass Boys,” Haliechuk says. “He was, like, ‘I think we should do a record where there are different voices, where my role is just one thing and different people contribute and it’ll be a bit like a cast.’ At the time I said, ‘No, you’re the voice, you’re the singer’ and just sort of forgot about it. But it ended up happening that way.”
The renewed outburst of creativity on Haliechuk’s part appears to have renewed Abraham’s enthusiasm for being in a band he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a part of anymore — maybe because he now feels “far less anxiety” over trying to assert F--ked Up’s output as his own.
It was, Abraham concedes, Haliechuk’s band in the beginning, “but as time went on, it became as much of a functional democracy as we have represented in North America and now it’s back to, like, a benevolent dictatorship. And I’m fine with that …
“There are very few bands that I feel had their creative peak this late in their career, but I think we’re one of those bands … And, you know, to get another kick at it one last time is pretty amazing. I’m still grateful at every step of this because, at the end of the day, I think I’m more of a fan than I am a musician. So to get to play fantasy punk band/rock band/indie band/working band for 15 years is mind-blowing.” Damian Abraham has long been the voice of the band F--ked Up, but he’s one of many in the new album.