The Chinese Zodiac dictates that the dog will come through for me every time. The dog, I'm told, is reliable, empathetic, and intelligent. The dog is the kind of friend everybody can use.
For a few years now, Fucked Up has played the dog for me. I resisted at first, after somebody led me to believe they traded in the blurry, retro thrash that was briefly in vogue at some point in the early aughties (and maybe they sort of did, at first, albeit with more sense of song). But I broke down and bought Epics in Minutes from Dr. Strange Records in Alta Loma, CA, and driving back home across the 210 I listened: these songs oozed intensity, and were hung with sparkling, nasty hooks that took me back to the first time I heard "Nervous Breakdown," even. I loved it.
I bought up all the records and eagerly awaited the arrival of Hidden World. It came last summer, thanks to the promiscuity of the Internet, and if you've been paying close attention you noticed it was my #1 record of 2006. Hidden World resonated with me like few recent records have, somewhere between the hard-edged but expansive melodies and Damien's furiously eloquent rants. So I drove to the record store (this time it was Eastside, in Tempe, AZ) to pick up my copy of Year of the Dog a few weeks ago.
I've put off this review because I'm puzzled. I should be standing up for your rights as a consumer, but it's not always that easy: Fucked Up has developed a highly refined aesthetic, and if you've been following along with their story this record holds few real surprises.
One of the songs ("Last Man Standing") is a re-recording-it's nervier and maybe more definitive, but still familiar. The other, "Year of the Dog," wants to be a big, churning epic, but it still fades fairly fast once the needle leaves the groove. The best part of the whole slab comes from the solemn, ringing glockenspiel notes that crop up in the latter song: a nice touch that fits in with the widescreen scope of Hidden World. The strings on Year of the Dog have taken on a bit of a droning, wailing abstractness, marking a subtle mutation from last year's crunchy but concise musicality.
The layout's a nice mix of elegance and punk functionalism: a classy cover with a wrap-around band bearing the embossed title, but no back side and virtually bare labels. The insert's got a fairly effective minimalist bent, with lyrics and credits in 18 pt. Fascist Roman Bold. Still, it makes you sort of miss the wooliness of the full-length (the comparison's unfair, but so is the world).
This record's not meant to be Fucked Up's magnum opus - but inevitably, following Hidden World, it feels like a holding pattern. Maybe that's inevitable too; the David Comes to Life musical apparently looms in the distance. But for a band like this, a single doesn't have to pale in the face of a full-length; "Teenage Problems" was worth a thousand other bands' over inflated LPs. Year of the Dog is a good record, but it got me wondering for the first time if Fucked Up can still do the dog.
