Get past the audacious concepts, the profanity, and Damian Abraham’s boarish grunt, and Fucked Up are essentially pragmatists, driven by a mission to rage within the machine. While Abraham may be conflicted about playing shows with Foo Fighters, being nominated for major awards and appearing on TV networks that still can’t say his band’s real name, they’re all necessary to give Fucked Up’s message the populist outreach it requires to be effective. Because unlike previous insurrectionists-turned-inside-operatives like the Clash or Refused, Fucked Up’s message isn’t political.
Rather, Abraham is hardcore's ?uestlove, a burly, gregarious, and eloquent music nerd maintaining a likable “What am I doing here?” outlook regardless of his successes, fixated on making the State of the Art as important as the State of the Union. Coincidentally, Glass Boys is similar to the Roots’ most recent album, ...And Then You Shoot Your Cousin—a relatively compact, dense piece of metacriticism taking an unsparing look at the genre of its creators and its social mores. The problem is that its message is also far more developed and interesting than the medium.
Glass Boys clocks in at 10 songs and 43 minutes, a canny move that preemptively neutralizes backlash or skepticism that would’ve arisen had Fucked Up tried to top 2011’s hour-plus rock opera David Comes to Life in any measurable way. It’s obvious that the aspirational Abraham conceded to guitarist/producer Mike Haliechuk’s desire to make a record befitting a “normal band.” And yet, with no ostensible “plot” and Abraham as the only recurring character, Glass Boys is more complex and thought-provoking than its predecessor. Most of the time, it’s like a Talkhouse piece-on-tape, with insider intel regarding art vs. commerce, nostalgia vs. forward thinking, individual vs. community, and why we have to frame these things as dichotomies to begin with. So make no mistake, this is heady stuff: while Abraham pours mulch and gravel all over his florid poetry ("Rejuvenations ocean spume perfume"), Glass Boys alludes to the patronage system, Greek mythology, primitive ritualism, pre-verbal communication, and basically everything short of the 2001 monolith to present Fucked Up as a tiny blip in the eternal timeline.
For all of its discourse and rhetoric, Glass Boys remains a very personal work and, more crucially, one that doesn’t preach or provide answers —though Eurycles pops up in a cameo, the album's inquisitive, open-ended discussion is more influenced by Socrates. In opener “Echo Boomer”, Abraham gives voice to Haliechuk’s reminiscence of being a 15-year old mesmerized by the possibilities of music. But by the penultimate “The Great Divide”, he looks back puzzled and guilt-ridden, wondering if youth is wasted on the wasted youth who put their faith in bands like Fucked Up rather than something greater (“We ushered in all that corrupts/ Now we’re drowning in the glut”). In between, Abraham and Haliechuk cop to confessional songwriting as a "Jesus Christ Pose"-style farce (“Paper the House”) and spitefully air grievances (“Led By Hand”), before ultimately accepting their fate as part of the continuum as an honor. After all, if an echo booms and no one hears it, did it even happen?
These are conversations worth having, and you can have them simply by reading the lyrics sheet, watching the videos, and reading interviews with the band. For all the talk of Fucked Up getting streamlined and concise, it turns out that streamlined, concise songs are nowhere near as interesting as their wildest, most highfalutin concepts; Glass Boys finds a Great Punk Band making a Good Rock Record that’s weirdly superfluous.
And let’s be clear, this is a rock band, increasingly a hardcore-derived version of the Hold Steady, with static classic rock riffage serving as a platform for functional, verbose one-note vocals (the Van Halen-evoking “The Art of Patrons” could even be swiped from Separation Sunday). On their early breakthroughs Hidden World and the Chemistry of Common Life, Fucked Up set themselves apart not by pushing hardcore in a new direction so much as completely blowing it wide open in a manner unseen since The Shape of Punk to Come or even Zen Arcade. But now, Fucked Up have channeled all of their symphonic ambitions for the sole purpose of making Glass Boys sound like it has as many overdubs as a record four times its length.
That’s literally the case as far as the drums go: Jonah Falco is playing four different drum tracks throughout Glass Boys, another example of Fucked Up’s delightful, crackpot scheming—it’s a cool idea that no punk band would pursue, either out of economic hardship or just the innate knowledge that playing four drum tracks at the same time might detract from the visceral impact of the music. There’s even more of a homogenizing effect on the guitars; rather than contributing contrast, melody, dynamics or texture, it’s the kind of indiscriminate layering that appeared on Be Here Now and MACHINA/Machines of God, turning a presumably hard-hitting rock record into a gelatinous ooze that surrounds and consumes the listener rather than attacking their ears. Though less so than on David Comes to Life, Abraham remains omnipresent and indistinct, a grit amidst a sound that emanates like toothpaste.
At times, the saturation of Glass Boys creates a wonderful, psychedelic effect—“Echo Boomer” is possibly meant to describe Abraham and Fucked Up as reverberations of a punk rock Big Bang, though it’s every bit as applicable to the actual sound of the song. Meanwhile, “Touch Stone” is an aural illusion where a two-chord modulation sounds like it’s endlessly, upwardly cresting. Combined with the spirited call-and-response of “Sun Glass”, the opening salvo of Glass Boys bears the promise of everything a direct and hook-filled Fucked Up album could be. But after “Warm Change” unravels into aimless guitar soloing and panned drums, Fucked Up usher in a second half that fails to distinguish itself in any way. Once again, there are guest vocalists supplementing the symphonic guitars—the credits lists cred-deficient Canucks such as Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie and Alexisonfire’s George Pettit, as well as indie heroes J. Mascis and Kurt Vile; with the exception of Mascis’ donkey bray on “Led By Hand”, they’re all just faint echoes struggling to be heard.
Glass Boys is a record dense with metacommentary, so it's possible that the record's claustrophobic production is meant to reflect Abraham and Haliechuk’s concerns about the walls closing in on Fucked Up. They’ve been deferential and self-effacing about their legacy, admitting they’ve lasted about a decade longer than even most successful hardcore bands. But they opted out of actual hardcore long ago; since signing with Matador, the genre has served as a theoretical control group for Fucked Up, something to compare the results of their experiments. Now, you can only hear faint echoes of their past greatness underneath the lard-laden production; it’s something that will please the fanbase Fucked Up have deservedly built and enrage the younger, angrier hardcore bands who will dismantle and try to improve on it, fueled by their own ideals and self-belief, however foolish it may seem in retrospect. Which actually validates Glass Boys’ ideas about hardcore's cycle of life—it just doesn’t make the music any more thrilling.
