Recap Fucked Up at The Borg Ward

Forget the fact that Fucked Up is on Matador Records or that it gets rave reviews from mainstream music publications and websites. Also forget the offbeat musical flourishes—the flutes, Farfisa organs, and even bongos—on last year’s The Chemistry Of Common Life. On Tuesday night at The Borg Ward Collective, the Canadian hardcore band kept it fast, loud, and brutal in the style of ’80s scene originators like Negative Approach, drowning out any and all indie rock pretenses.

Decked out in athletic shorts and high-top basketball sneakers, Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham—who also goes by Pink Eyes—looked and sounded like a hip-hop version of NA’s John Brannon. While Brannon oozed absolute malice and dread, Abraham has a more open and playful approach to hardcore. Performing before an incredibly enthusiastic audience, Abraham proved remarkably adept at working the crowd. Throughout the set, Abraham donned a wig, draped himself in Christmas lights, and picked up willing audience members and carried them around on his back. (Remarkably, he never missed a beat while literally bench-pressing one young fan.) Abraham’s antics never seemed threatening; rather, they knocked down the artificial, and often intimidating, boundary between performer and audience. 

As Abraham played the role of a well-adjusted Darby Crash, the rest of Fucked Up provided the perfect soundtrack for his strange behavior. Drawing heavily from The Chemistry Of Common Life, the band ripped through “Son The Father,” “Magic Word,” “Crooked Head,” and “Twice Born” with reckless abandon. While the band simply cannot recreate the layered sound it achieved in the recording studio, the presence of three guitar players gave the band’s material a sense of depth that eludes most hardcore bands. It was absolutely overwhelming (in a good way), never became monotonous or overdone.

The most likable thing about Fucked Up is that no matter what happens to the band in the future, it will always stay true to its hardcore roots. In the middle of the set, the band played “Black Albino Bones,” a standout track from Chemistry. With lines like “The orgasmic of the fantastic / We well up, and then we explode,” I assumed the song was about sex or drugs. Actually, as Abraham told the crowd, the song is about the joys of record collecting. Whoever has zealously tracked down rare punk 7-inches knows exactly what he was talking about.