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.