Entries associated with the tag "Fucked Up":

I'm finally home from Austin, and aside from the mild coma I slipped into last night, I seem to be suffering little in the way of serious damage from the festivities. I'm working on my column about it—which will be online Friday— but there are a couple of things I wasn't able to fit in, including (for various reasons) two of the best shows I saw.

One was the Pack and the Federation (warning: tons of auto-play files on their MySpace) at the Catchdubs showcase on Friday. Aside from the Pack, I've never really liked listening to hyphy music. The description makes it sound like the kind of thing I should be playing all day every day, but in reality I can't really stand the shit outside of a club. But having seen the Federation get completely dumb all over the Beauty Bar patio stage, I have come to the realization that every person in the world should have to go to a hyphy show at least once in their lives. Even if you don't like hyphy—even if you don't like rap at all—you will have a good time. The Federation are all decent rappers, but they're ridiculously talented showmen. They're willing to do just about anything onstage—including putting on glowstick stunna shades—to get the audience to wild out, which might seem kind of desperate if they weren't just absolutely dedicated to the idea of people having fun. If the entire world went to a Federation show, I believe they could bring about global peace, Wyld Stallyns style.

My postshow party crew on Saturday took a little too much time getting it together after the LiveFastDie show, so we all showed up at the Vice afterparty a little too late. Luckily there was a backup plan, in the form of a small generator, the Lamar Street pedestrian bridge, and a bunch of cases of beer. Fucked Up and the Carbonas traded off three-song sets to a bunch of drunks in a full-on, old-school mosh pit until hella late. On the really good songs you could actually feel the bridge shake and flex beneath the jumping bodies, which added some dangerous excitement for those of us still together enough to think about those things. When I left at 4:30 AM the beer reinforcements were just showing up. As far as I can tell, the bridge held up.

Today I count myself among the walking wounded, thanks in part to a seriously late, seriously partying party last night. At this point I'm not sure if anything down here is going to beat watching the Pack play behind an Amtrak station at 4 AM using a compact Japanese car as a stage to an audience of about a hundred people drinking Natty Light.

Last night was a big night down here for Chicago. I personally caught Brenmar, a solo set by Bruce from Yakuza, Office, and the Ponys, and ran into a bunch of other Chi-towners on the street and at shows. I missed David Vandervelde and Catfish Haven, but reports on them were strongly positive. I also missed Flosstradamus's set after the Pack—I'd already stumbled back to my hotel to fall asleep in front of Angel reruns for the second night in a row —but in usual Floss style they're playing something like 387 parties while they're down here, so I'm sure I'll catch at least one.

Aside from the sheer bonkers-ness of the Pack show, the best show of the fest so far was Fucked Up's set last night. The show was at a weird, pseudo-yuppie kind of bar, but the band played like it was the basement of a punk house. Lead singer Pink Eyes bashed himself in the forehead with his microphone when he wasn't barking into it, and the rest of the band was just scalding. I'm going to try my best to catch the rest of their shows down here. I could probably watch that band every day. Actually, having Fucked Up play a private show for me in my living room to start every day would be awesome.

OK, obviously I need some sort of sandwich or something. After lunch I'm hitting up the trade show for schwag—is it too early to wear a Zune T-shirt ironically?—and then shows, shows, shows until I fall down. I can't wait to see what White Savage does to the unsuspecting people down here.

I'm currently on my eleventy-jillionth listen to Fucked Up's Hidden World, which came out on Jade Tree this Tuesday. They're from Montreal, they all have terrible stage names, and they write hardcore songs that regularly pass the five-minute mark without getting boring, which I don't know has ever happened before.

The other big talking point on Fucked Up is that its members are all seriously mentally ill -- or, at least they want you to think they are. They supposedly get into big fights with each other, and they can't fly on planes, and all this other stuff. Which I could really care less about. If they're really crazy, that would probably help explain why they decided to write seven-minute long punk songs, and if they're not it's just another made-up band gimmick. Whatever. Half the reason people put bands together these days is so they can make up catchy fictional "band facts." The other half is coming up with a good band name, and if coming up with a good band name was a video game, I think Fucked Up may have gotten the high score.