Ryan's Fucked Up Review

The Chemistry of Common Life, the second album release from Toronto band Fucked Up, is an incredibly decadent punk rock album – you can tell that from the flute intro in the first song. To a lot of punk fans, especially older ones, this must seem like a contradiction – after all, punk as a genre first became popular as a reaction against decadence in music. By going against that impression of what punk 'should be', though, you get the feeling that Fucked Up feels they're doing the most punk thing possible. What they have accomplished, though, is an album that doesn't quite know if it wasn't to be punk, or be a critical favourite.

That's not to say, of course, that punk can't be critically acclaimed, just that those two things typically value different things in an album. That, if anything, is the main failing of Chemistry of Common Life: it's unsure of what it wants to be, and as a result it never really commits itself to becoming the album that it could have been.

Now, don't get me wrong: there are some fun tunes on this album, like Son the Father and No Epiphany, which have a classic, 80s-style punk feel to them, especially in the vocals. Sadly, though, the good songs aren't quite enough to save the album from mediocrity. Some day, Fucked Up might be able to win a Polaris prize, but I can't see them doing it on the strength of this album. It's not the type of album I'll put on in the future, but if it turns up on a shuffled playlist, I won't be turning it off, either.