Fucked Up, Sunday, Nov. 11, 9 p.m., $15–$18, Kings, Raleigh, www.kingsraleigh.com
Like 2011’s David Comes to Life, Dose Your Dreams, the fifth record from incomparable Canadian hardcore omnivores Fucked Up, is a heavily conceptual album. It is staggering in both scope and stretch.
But where David Comes to Life was the portrait of the artists as a young band, Dose Your Dreams is Fucked Up’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce’s masterwork, it’s a dense and sprawling text marked by intricate nuance and complexity. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative is so stuffed with characters and tangential ideas that it should really come with footnotes.
At the center of Dose Your Dreams’ psychedelic storm is David Eliade, the protagonist of David Comes to Life. But the story isn’t solely his; there’s also Joyce Tops, an aging radical who lost the love of her life, Lloyd, who’s lost in void. There’s also time travel, anarchy, simulated universes, suicide, and the crushing yoke of capitalism. It’s damn near impossible to follow without a lyrics sheet; even with one, it’s still mostly impossible. (Like Ulysses, anyone who claims to completely understand Dose Your Dreams, or to have finished it without taking a substantial break, is probably lying to you.)
But enjoying the record isn’t predicated on following its Byzantine story arc. In the way that its narrative cycles through voices, Dose Your Dreams continually pushes in new directions, jumping from sprinting hardcore to dark New Wave, gauzy shoegaze, burly rave-friendly psychedelia, and beyond. Fucked Up has never been a band that’s let itself be constrained within the boundaries of punk and hardcore, but Dose Your Dreams attempts to go everywhere and do everything. In that way, it is a work that is at once maddening and marvelous.
A few days before the band launched a six-week tour, Fucked Up guitarist Mike Haliechuk, who wrote the bulk of Dose Your Dreams, spoke with us about balancing fatalism and idealism, the perpetuating ideals of punk and a certain Irish author’s convoluted masterpiece.
INDY: Is the crux of Dose Your Dreams this push and pull between fatalism and idealism?
MIKE HALIECHUK: For me, it’s a very hopeful project. It’s a fatalistic hope. I won’t see another world in my lifetime, and my children probably won’t, either. But the thing is, I’m a musician, so I sort of do live in a different world, you know? I’ve never had a real job. And my work is going around playing music for people, and for an hour, you hope that those people, they live in a different world as well. So much of my life is living in a different world than everybody else. So that’s weird, too.
Dose Your Dreams is also rooted the ideals of punk in terms of its underlying ethos: questioning the status quo, shrugging off the yoke of restrictive norms, embracing agency and your dreams, and working to turn those dreams into your reality. How do you process those kinds of ideals differently now than when you were a teenager and diving headlong into punk and what that meant?
When I was a teenager, I thought that all my dreams would come true. As an idealistic teenager, you don’t have an experience yet with the hardness of the world. You think society is this malleable thing that you get to grow up into and have a say about because you haven’t learned the harsh lessons. The work I did when I was a kid was to change the world in a real way, and now it’s just sort of like, “Ugh.” Being an idealistic adult is sort of like a tribute to that, and in the hope that you’re just passing some kind of idealism back down to younger people now to carry that dream into the next generation or whatever.
There’s a narrative thread kind of runs through Dose Your Dreams that you’re telling through David, Joyce, and Lloyd and the other characters in there. Why return to that approach?
I like writing a narrative. There was some quote, I think it was from Yeats or something. Somebody asked if he was interested in writing free verse, and his reply was something to the effect of, “Writing free verse poetry is like playing tennis without a net.” [Ed. note: It was Robert Frost who said that.] I like to have a box to work inside. I like telling a story. I like having a line to draw in. And it’s just a fun way to write, and it’s an easier way to justify telling stories about your own experience, to put a little artifice into it.
It’s interesting that you bring up free verse, because I’ve found that a lot of my reference points for Dose Your Dreams have been literary, and not musical. Like, I can more easily compare it to something like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Huxley’s Brave New World.
The Ulysses comparison is very apt, because that’s what it is, you know? This record is meant to be a loose retelling of that book. There [are] a lot of parallels in there to find. There’s a ton of shit in there that I put in as parallels, like the song titles and story mood and the characters. It’s all in there. The Joyce character comes from there, and there’s eighteen songs, and the last one is from the woman’s perspective. And the pastiche of different musical styles is meant to be a reflection of different writing styles in the novel. The feel of it is just trying to be this modernist thing where it’s very loose. The narrative is sort of all over the place, but it’s more about the feel of the thing rather than the story. And it’s just about being free and feeling free in this world.
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