Fucked Up – “Dose Your Dreams” & “Accelerate” Video
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Toronto punks Fucked Up have shared two more songs from their forthcoming album Dose Your Dreams, following up its recent killer slew of tracks: “House Of Keys,” “Normal People,” “Raise Your Voice Joyce,” and its addendum “Two I’s Closed.”
“Dose Your Dreams” and “Accelerate” are online today as a kind of digital single. Intriguingly, both songs are exactly 5:29 in length. The new album’s title track is the more surprising, musically speaking. It finds Fucked Up’s already proggy and expansive take on hardcore colored with psychedelic dance overtones in step with early ’90s UK titans like Primal Scream and Jesus Jones. “Accelerate,” the B-side of sorts, is reliably excellent Fucked Up fare, complete with Damian Abraham’s depraved scream, heart attack-inducing percussion and brutal guitars that glitch and spiral, while the whole thing is drenched in a comforting, heavy fog of noise.
Maybe even more gratifying, however, is the ambitiously cinematic “Accelerate” video directed by guitarist Mike Haliechuk (who is proving he has a serious eye, also responsible for the “Normal People” video) that captivates for the whole of its six minutes, continuing to reveal Fucked Up’s penchant for offbeat, literary psychedelia and concept fiction.
While it’s hard decipher the nuances of the video’s plot, it’s a glorious feast of visuals. Heroic footage of Fucked Up’s signature full-throttle performances is merged with a complex web of comical and uncanny narratives starring the band: one character gloomily communes with a bomb-shaped puppet that shares lead vocals with Abraham, and carries around a suitcase that a ghost/off-screen thief is perpetually trying to steel; Josh Zucker attempts futilely return something at Walmart; Haliechuk spends an existential day at a museum; Jonah Falco is freaking out in a warehouse; Sandy Miranda takes Fucked Up-branded tabs of something; and someone else is wearing rabbit head in a sportswear store.
The characters’ exploits are chopped up and sewn together with vignettes of disembodied limbs that perform increasingly manic, impish child-like gestures: they spray a can of shaving cream, insert a finger into a bread roll, squeeze a tube of toothpaste, squish a banana, karate kick a Jenga tower, plunge a spoon into a sundae, grind dirt into a white shirt, tear apart a Rubik’s cube and more.
Fucked Up enlisted psychedelic Toronto poet-rapper Tyriqueordie to kick off the video, as well for a stark, lovely spoken word interlude four minutes in that adds to the nonsense, but also somehow feels like it explains everything if you listen hard enough. Watch and listen below.
Dose Your Dreams is out 10/5 via Merge Records. Pre-order it here.