Fucked Up are arguably the best hardcore album band of at least the last 20 years-- the Toronto sextet's Hidden World and The Chemistry of Common Life both manage the nearly impossible feat of keeping a piledriver punk-rock assault compelling for more than 45 minutes straight. In practice, though, they're more of a singles act. Since 2002, they've released a few dozen 7" and 12" singles, usually in "collectible" quantities. So this isn't a follow-up to Chemistry: It's their second singles compilation, and like the first one, Epics in Minutes, it's thoroughly disorderly. This one begins with their debut single, the not-quite-there-yet "No Pasaran", then leapfrogs around their career, encompassing a handful of A-sides, B-sides, and demos, as well as a 2008 Daytrotter session.
Despite its nonchronological sequencing and song-cherrypicking, it never really comes together as an album; it's more like "the many moods of Fucked Up," or, rather, their many variations on one mood. When punk bands expand their palettes, it usually means they take a stab at some form that's not all about loud-hard-fast. Fucked Up have planted their flag in loud-hard-fast pretty firmly, and Damian "Pink Eyes" Abraham's steel-wool bellow is the central point of their sound. Most of their best songs, like the torrential six-minute "Triumph of Life" (a demo of a Hidden World track), expand the boundaries of hardcore punk, rather than moving outside it: they're flexing their heads, as it were.
The less impressive songs here, on the other hand, are just really well-played hardcore with a huge guitar sound, for which there's something to be said. "Generation" might be a parody of lunkheadbanging straightedge anthems, but it's functionally very similar to the real thing, for both good and ill: it rocks like crazy, Pink Eyes sounds absolutely committed in his howls about "no hesitation/ Freedom or death", and there might be a very tiny set of quotation marks hovering around its riff or lyrics. "Fixed Race" is a distant cousin of Wire's proto-hardcore anthem "12XU", and that's about all there is to it. A simple, straight-ahead version of "No Epiphany" is perfectly okay, but it also makes Chemistry's not-at-all-simple version sound much cooler by comparison.
Couple Tracks also features Fucked Up's covers of three very angry, very un-hardcore-punk bands: Another Sunny Day ("Anorak City"), the Shop Assistants ("I Don't Wanna Be Friends with You" and "Looking Back"), and Dolly Mixture ("Dream Come True" and "He's So Frisky"). That's a beautiful gesture-- Fucked Up's relationship with twee pop isn't an outsider's ha-ha perspective, it's genuine engagement with an entire scene that's got an unlikely but undeniable formal link with their own work. Still, it's a gesture: Performing scalding hardcore versions of those songs doesn't add much to them or play to Fucked Up's strengths. (Also, "I don't want to be civilized/ You leave me and I'll scratch your eyes out" has distinctly different implications coming from a screaming 300-pound man than it did when the Shop Assistants' waifish Alex Taylor sang it.)
The most interesting reinventions here, actually, are both Fucked Up covering themselves: the Daytrotter remakes of Chemistry's "Magic Word" and Hidden World's "David Comes to Life", which run Pink Eyes' hollering through some kind of echo-flange mangler. "Magic Word" loosens up its riff and its rhythm into an exuberant strut, and "David" becomes what the band called "a straight up disco dance version" at the time (post-Chic guitars, a beat that gallops as much as it stomps). Each of them blasts at least as hard as the original version but effectively finds a different song within its outlines-- examples in miniature of what Fucked Up have been doing for hardcore.
