On "Dose Your Dreams", Fucked Up Return to Their Magnum Opus With an Even Better One
Let me be very clear here: Dose Your Dreams, Fucked Up’s first album in four years, is unquestionably their best record.
For a group already known for their ambitious 2011 rock opera David Comes to Life, the thought they would top it with another double album seems patently insane, but they actually *did it*. It’s an overwhelming assortment of punk, psych, digital hardcore with elements of arena rock and other genre experiences. That said, it represents everything great about them to this point and pushing them in completely new directions for the future. It’s an album elevating a ‘great band’ to an ‘all-time great band’.
There’s an incredible amount of ground to cover here, so I’ll provide some cliff notes. For an album that’s this ambitious, it’s also a bit of a changing of the guard – band mastermind/guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco are in firm control of the band, pushing Fucked Up in directions they couldn’t have dreamed up. Vocalist Damian Abraham has taken a less active presence in the group as priorities in his life shift, being deployed a little more carefully across 13 of the album’s 18 songs – and it works beautifully.
Whether it’s the catchy-as hell glam rock stomp of “Normal People,” the disco-psych (yes, you read that right) of “Dose Your Dreams” the gutbucket hardcore of “Living in a Simulation,” the throbbing snyth pummel of “Mechanical Bull” or guitarist Ben “Young Guv” Cook’s insta-classic shredded lead vocal on “Accelerate”, there’s a staggering amount to get into. Jonah Falco handles vocals on two songs, including the standout Beach Boys-ian “Love is an Island in the Sea”. Even J Mascis shows up to duet with Jennifer Castle on “Came Down Wrong,” which sounds like a little Dinosaur Jr. tribute in miniature.
Dose Your Dreams is about many things. Sure, it’s about Fucked Up’s most famous character, but it’s also the picture of a band – six people with disparate influences pushing outside what it means to *be* a band. No longer confined to traditional roles – there’s no longer one singer, one guitarist, one drummer, so on and so forth – they have made a record that’s messy, fearless and totally original – so much so that it needs to be heard to be totally understood. If it’s the last record the group makes – which always seems to be a threat – nearly every interview highlights how different each member is from each other, then holy shit, they went for broke and nailed it.
Given their track record in the last fifteen years, it would also not be surprising to see Fucked Up again reinvent themselves as something less recognizable, more fluid, more daring, and more powerful than we could ever possibly imagine. That’s what they’ve done here, because that’s what truly great bands do.