Fucked up

Dose Your Dreams Merge

They’ve got attitude, man, and they’re malignant.

Check the song title on this record: None Of Your Business Man. I Don’t Wanna Live In This World Anymore. That’s followed, with typically bleak humour, by How To Die Happy and Two I’s Closed. This is messy music that sprawls and brawls in the shadows, like recalcitrant, sweaty punks refusing to grow up, and turning the guitars up every time someone complains.

The voice is raw, harsh, strained. Psychedelic, if you can bear the intensity. It’s Buzzcocks shorn of the Krautrock leanings and given a hefty dosing of nicotine and alcohol.

The single Raise Your Voice

Joyce is brutal, brilliant, a raucous anthem to the Barney Gumble inside all of us, with a truly fucked up guitar solo to end. Beautifully stupid. Stupidly beautiful. Meanwhile, Normal People is lifeaffirming in a death-refusing way.

Fucked Up are Canada’s answer to Australia’s Smith Street Band and the 1970s version of the Germs. The six members may have a shelf life way past most of their colleagues’ expiry dates, yet Dose Your Dreams is fucking ace.