“Our career has always been a struggle. We come from this dark musical place – we’ve always been escaping something.”
Mike Haliechuk, the calm guitarist and songwriter who, curiously, operates professionally under the moniker 10,000 Marbles, is talking about the decade-long life of the yelling, aggressively loud, prize-winning Toronto band Fucked Up. The group has just released its conceptual album David Comes to Life – a rock opus that more refined types might see as Cro-Magnon rather than magnum.
The titular protagonist works in the basement of a light-bulb factory, in the dark for the brightness of others. Though Haliechuk, 31, once told an interviewer that he himself had toiled in a bulb works, it wasn’t true. But the juxtapositional occupation stuck with him, enough that it became the starting point for a four-act “rock opera” that begins in a bleak place and winds its way to something much brighter and hopeful.
“Empty the theatre, rush through the door, start living the life you never could before,” encourages the lead throatist, Damian Abraham (a.k.a. Pink Eyes), on the album’s resolving conclusion Lights Go Up – truth and cheesy Broadway advice from the record’s shape-shifting narrative.
“Even though there’s this weird, fictional framework to the album,” explains Haliechuk, speaking from a food court in a west-end Toronto mall where he, drummer Jonah Falco and co-lyricist Abraham hashed out the libretto, “that’s the message we’ve hidden behind this musical.”
Set in Thatcher-era Britain, David Comes to Life is a love story involving a doomed pair and a protest action gone wrong. A twist comes in the form of a narrator who turns out to be less than impartial. Themes of anarchy, guilt, religion, hope and ugly industrialization work their way through a plot that isn’t entirely fleshed out.
“The songs describe the emotion of a certain character in a certain stage of their life,” says Haliechuk, impassive and white-bread clean cut. “The record doesn’t follow any action to a certain extent. It mostly colours in the characters.”
There are plans for a staged musical telling in the future, with the narrative clarified and tightened.
Musically, the album is quite focused – less colourful than the beautiful blitzkrieg of 2008’s Polaris-winning Chemistry of Common Life, but not without ear-catching riffs and melodies. The band is often described as hard-core-punk but, other than the guttural roar of Abraham (who makes Roger Daltrey sound like Sam Cooke), David Comes to Life is closer to the Who than to Black Flag.
(Though the label’s press release references the Who’s classic rock opera Tommy, Haliechuk admits to never having listened to that album all the way through. “I’m not so well versed in the works that this record might be compared with,” he says.)
If there’s a disappointment to a record styled as rock opera, it’s the lack of repeating motifs and quotes – there’s not a lot of sophistication to the blazing, alt-rock score. The reason is that the music was written and recorded first, without any overall conception in mind. The lyrics came later. “It was sequenced with the narrative in mind,” explains Haliechuk, “but mostly, musically, it’s just a record.”
Just a record? Not quite. David Comes to Life represents the continuing coming to life of a band that started out musically and aesthetically punk a decade ago. And though they get credit for challenging the notions of what a hard-core band can or should be, the group doesn’t bother with the presumptions of genres any more.
“When you’re younger, those labels might define what kind of person you are,” says Haliechuk, pulling at the collar of his button-down Polo shirt. “But nobody can stick to that for too long, and when you’re in a band with different personalities it’s too confusing to even think about.”
The sextet’s novel actions aren’t aimed at thwarting expectations: Stunts and projects such as the beer-soaked 12-hour-long free gig at a New York gallery, performing a live film score to a silent movie and releasing their album at midnight at a pop-up record store were done to keep things interesting for themselves and, admittedly, to attract attention.
“It’s not that we want to shock people, necessarily,” says Haliechuk, who on stage presents himself in expressionless form in contrast to the burly, half-naked hullabaloo of front man Abraham, “but we understand we get the opportunities we do because we try to do things that are interesting or noteworthy.”
And so, the thinking-man’s punk band gets featured in The New York Times and has its new album streamed on National Public Radio, an institution not normally given to hyping the hard core.
According to Haliechuk, who runs record label One Big Silence, home of the buzzed-about electro band Austra, David Comes to Life was an idea that the band talked about for years. It was a fall-back project, and now it’s done. “We don’t have that backup plan any more,” he says. “What do we do now?”
You have to imagine that the mammoth-music band with the brightly lit minds won’t be in the dark much longer.
To celebrate the release of David Comes to Life, the band turns Toronto’s Clint Roenisch Gallery (944 Queen St. W.) into a temporary record store at 12:01 a.m. June 7.
