Fucked Up - Couple Tracks

F***** Up has a pretty admirable career trajectory. Just by the looks of their music catalogue alone, they can account for about as much music as a band that's been around for 15 years. F***** Up did it in about 10. Not only have they unfolded the strict hardcore-punk chaos of their early beginnings to a more rich, complex array of traditional alternative rock and punk, they have also released a dizzying amount of music, including split-EPs and impossible-to-find singles, since their inception in the early 2000s.

Couple Tracks, their new singles compilation, is about as complete and fullfilling an album can get when referring to a band that pride themselves on the delights of vinyl collecting, liner-note analysis and rare mixtape assembly. It would be cheap to call it the band's complete anthology, since it's really just an assortment of B-sides and what-not. No, this album is directed more towards the people who love to categorize their music collection and participate in the hunt for rarities

On the song Couple Tracks, lead singer Damien "Pink Eyes" Abraham calls them "archivists." If you pre-ordered the vinyl months prior, you get a free companion 7-inch oddly called Couple Tracks. It's a single with a song called Heir Apparent on the B-side. So strange that with the release of a singles compilation they'd release a single of the same name (and cover art) right next to it. These guys are really fond of the obscurity, like the dignified vinyl collectors they are.

Since most of these songs are rehashes and edits of songs from years prior, you wouldn't expect anything new. But it's a treat to hear these songs play together in serialized form. Most of it works, and some of it is just F***** Up being too experimental.

"Generations", one of F***** Up's most politically-aware/satirical songs, is also one of their best. It starts with a sample from a group of Palestinians chanting, and then F***** Up build a three-chord melody out of it. What initiates is a pretty anthemic hardcore shout-out-loud song about... well I don't really think they know what it's about either.

"Carried Out to Sea", a song that appeared on their impressive, but flawed hardcore album Hidden World, also appears here as a demo. Both versions sound exactly alike, which shows how little this band needs for improvement. They build on ideas and sometimes the results come out exactly the way it was written on paper.

They mess around with genres, or so they proclaim. They go through a twee-pop phase, but in the F***** Up point-of-view, that just means there's a catchy melody. Pink Eyes still screams during "I Hate Summer" and "Anorak City", two of the most melodic songs I've ever heard by F***** Up, which still manages to sound right at home.

The Daytrotter Session tracks are really hit-or-miss. But that's really the point of Daytrotter, a studio in West Illinois where bands are invited to play their songs with old instruments. It works with bands like Dodos and Department of Eagles, but a band like F***** Up, who are all about multiple guitar tracks with heavy distortion and Pink Eye-growl, well it just doesn't seem right.

F***** Up released a similar singles compilation in 2004 called Epics in Minutes with the same idea. Let's put all of the singles and tapes we've sold out of, and put them in one CD for everyone to share. It was a decent compilation with some gems ("Police") and really old demos of an indecipherable Abraham ("Land of Nod").

Couple Tracks builds on that idea, but with more an emphasis on the collector of wax. You make the singles compilation for people who missed out on purchase. But they made this compilation as a collector's item as well. Releasing this compilation reveals a sense of religious respect for the archive.

There's a youtube video by City Sonic TV where cameras follow Pink Eyes, a mastodon of a man. He's in regular clothes, walking around his local record store talking about D.I.Y. punk. From the interview, you just see the excitement he gets from his surroundings. He refers to buying records as buying artifacts, and claims the record store "is the ritual, this is the church." I would go ahead and say Couple Tracks is their chapter to that bible. Chapter F***** Up, Verse A. Amen.

Airhorn vol. 1

NOTE: The following blog post, and the ones that proceed it, are articles I wrote for my school newspaper The Beacon under my music column Exploding Head.

So for the past month and a half, I've been trying to scratch dubstep's surface, trying to find as many artists and labels to play on the radio so that I could one day, in the near future, start a dubstep/grime show on Radiate FM. Dubstep, a genre assembled in the heart of London, mixes aspects of Jungle, Drum & Bass, Reggae/Dub and House music. Add a little bit of bass to establish the foundational rhythm and you've got dubstep.

I've been rummaging through dubstep blogs and labels' archives, trying to dig my way into this odd, intriguing London culture. Through my research, I came across Zomby's Where Were You in 92' and while listening to the record, I was reintroduced to the repetitive airhorn sound effect. Most of Zomby's songs contain the airhorn but Where Were You in '92, in particular, goes excess on the airhorn. On purpose, though, because the album acts as a retrospective Jungle throwback record.

But you know what I'm talking about, though. It's the same damn sound effect played in almost every dubstep, dancehall and reggaeton song. It's the same sound effect you've been wondering about since you first heard it on that Nina Sky or Sean Paul song. I've always wondered why this sound effect, of all sound effects is used so heavily in these songs. Why these songs? Why not indie-rock songs or electro?

here's the sample:


Is it a big, raucous behemoth of a sound that acts as some form of a global beacon for music that isn't from America? Most of the songs that supply the horn are by artists from South America, the Carribean or across the pond starting in Africa and and ending somewhere in Brighton. Is it simply just a cool sound used because it adds complexity to the song? I've heard a lot of dubstep songs use the horn sample excessively, possibly to safeguard the track from mediocrity. Well, I'm shoeing in on my former hypothesis.

I also found it singular and weird that I'd spend an entire article writing about a horn. I also found it weird that I'd spend more than one article traveling around the internet and making a couple of phone calls finding an answer to my question. So this article will definitely be continued into a series of articles branching different explanations for the sound, and possibly analyzing the genres in which the sound is employed.

I've been losing my mind, Pixies-style, trying to understand it and I feel as if I'd be providing good service to the concerned reader/music aficionado if I was to tell them what the horn was used for, and not just settle for the horn being used by producers for funsies sake. If you're as obsessive as I am about these little quirks, then hopefully you'd appreciate my trek to make sense out of this damn horn.

Just from simplistic web research and DJ forum-browsing, there are different handles for this dancehall SOS. Some DJs refer to it as the Dub Siren, though, this name is a little deceiving. The Dub Siren is actually an synth/effects pedal used for clubs and parties to modify different preset sounds. It's used mainly for effect and DJs adjust it through a pitch nob. Most of the sounds you'll hear are familiar since they have the same cultural resonance as the airhorn sample.

You can purchase one on eBay for cheap, as far as equipment goes. The seller, circuit-bender, included the product was good for raves, but apparently nobody told them that the "rave" died in the mid-90s. Though, with ever-evolving technology and the portability of autotune, a DJ can just download a Dub Siren on the iPhone app store and form a rave wherever they go. Basically, the physical Dub Siren effect/synth pedal is obsolete these days and can only serve the purpose of being an obscure novelty.

But the airhorn is definitely not called a Dub Siren. So I will consider that statement DEBUNKED!

Stay tuned for the next airhorn volume.