Over the band’s 16-year career, Fucked Up has alternated between more straight-ahead hardcore on its proper albums and a parallel lane of experimental releases named after the Chinese zodiac. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the dichotomy between the two modes is still intact enough where it’s fair to say Fucked Up has operated as two different bands. For perspective, compare how 2014’s Glass Boys featured Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie, while 2012’s Year of the Tiger featured Jim Jarmusch.
Like last year’s two-track, 45-minute release, This Mother Forever, Year of the Snake sees Fucked Up venturing further out into realms of drone, ambient, and psychedelia with shades of prog and fusion thrown in for good measure. In fact, the two releases work as companion pieces and make the most sense as a pair. Both feature epic-length songs in the 15-to-30-minute range. But it’s their differences that reveal the full breadth of Fucked Up’s ambitions.
Where This Mother Forever sticks to a uniform structure of slow building—its two songs are basically single ideas stretched about as far as they can go—Year of the Snake flows in a less linear fashion, its ideas materializing and de-materializing as if the band could have turned them into separate songs but chose instead to let them bleed into one another. Over its 24-minute span, the title track encompasses simplistic riffing that verges on stoner metal, pastoral new-age psychedelia (complete with pan flute, recorder, and prayer bowl), epic hard rock, and a violin section that lands convincingly close to post-rock. Each section has ample time to simmer and it never feels like the band sacrifices flow for the sake of experimentation.
About halfway through the title track, when Fucked Up are going full bore channeling 2112-era Rush at their most majestic, the song transitions so that a synth figure bubbles up from underneath. The two parts initially clash, like someone bumping loud music in a car not far away. For that moment, Year of the Snake sounds almost like a mashup, but it’s short-lived. It also exemplifies how carefully considered all of the decisions on Year of the Snake are.
On the other hand, nothing feels especially careful about the voice of Damian Abraham, whose bark sounds so large and forceful it's like listening to King Kong next to an orchestra. That contrast gives Year of the Snake its distinct character. And as Fucked Up have delved into ever more delicate forms of expression, it’s been interesting to see how the band addresses the discrepancy between Abraham's style and the rest of the instrumentation. Abraham doesn’t appear on the second track, drummer Jonah Falco’s six-minute instrumental “Passacaglia,” and guitarist Mike Haliechuk composed the title track in a way that employs Abraham as an intermittent texture rather than a focal point. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of Abraham to go around, but only that if his voice was a dealbreaker for you before, Year of the Snake might be your best shot at appreciating everything that Fucked Up have to offer. (Guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook do not appear on the EP.)
At the beginning of “Passacaglia,” which functions as a kind of denouement for the title track, the guitars (played by Falco) contain echoes of Killing Joke’s groundbreaking 1980 self-titled debut. As revolutionary as Killing Joke sounded at the time, they approached their music as if it was a given that punk’s rules were there to be shattered. Likewise, even after decades’ worth of relaxing boundaries, Fucked Up bastardize hardcore in a way that gives off the thrill of creative heresy. As a creative insurgency waged from within its own ranks, Year of the Snake makes the genre sound more pliable than ever.
