Fucked Up – Couple Tracks (2010) [Matador] // Grade: A+

Fucked Up is a difficult band to argue. Don’t love the music? Okay, fine (I mean…weird, but fine) but who’s capable of truly hating a band who A) sports weird/rad aliases like Pink Eyes and 10,000 Marbles, B) played live on MTV Canada to crowd that totally effed the studio, then got themselves invited back and did the same thing to a bathroom, C) has this strange manager/fifth Beatle situation with a guy no one knows much about, including his real name, and D) turned hardcore punk on its head by making a record that not only shouted the genre’s ethos from the mountaintop but also happened to sound very little like any hardcore ever recorded.

Oh, and then they won a Polaris Music Prize for that record. Just, you know, by the way.

And even if you don’t consider The Chemistry of Common Life to be among the best records ever made, it’s still super-easy to find something to love about the Toronto sextet; their output has been so prolific and visionary, you’ll almost certainly stumble across three songs you can’t live without. “Stumble across”, of course, being the operative phrase—until now, tracking down most of Fucked Up’s single releases required infinite hours, serious connections and tons of eBay luck.

So thank god for Couple Tracks: 25 singles, b-sides and rarities spanning from 2002 to 2009, gathered onto two discs called “The Hard Stuff” and “The Fun Stuff”. There’s the explosive first single and Spanish Civil War-influenced “No Parasan”; the strangely peppy, unreleased demo “Carried Out To Sea”; the b-side cover of Another Sunny Day’s “Anorak City”; a manic alternate version of last year’s “No Epiphany”; even the hysterically awesome holiday jam “David Christmas”. And though Matador considers the collection a sort of pseudo-companion to the band’s first singles album (2004’s Epic In Minutes), it still barely scratches the surface—Fucked Up’s recording history encompasses so many releases in so little time, it’ll take way more than three discs to cover it all.

But Couple Tracks isn’t some milquetoast rarity geekfest. Sure, it’s a collection you sink into and study, liner notes in hand, but the enjoyment is far more primal than intellectual: the joy of hearing a band develop from their raucous, fuck-you punk roots into something visionary and sharply unique. Not that they’ve lost any of their buzzing, neon energy and political irreverence in the process—Pink Eyes still screams bloody murder, Fucked Up is still fucked up—but they’ve certainly grown into themselves in a way lots of hardcore bands never had the chance to explore. But then, Fucked Up has never been just another hardcore band—a fact that even their earliest, most elemental songs suggest. Get this now and put it on repeat; these discs are an amazing capsule look at a band so deserving of the acclaim and clearly destined for even bigger, even better, even more.

- Rue Sauvage