LimeWire Music Blog

Last night, Fort Greene’s Brooklyn Masonic Temple — which is quickly becoming one of my favorite music venues — hosted Fucked Up as they celebrated the first anniversary of the release of their landmark album, the Polaris Prize-winning The Chemistry of Common Life, which the band set out to recreate in its entirety: no easy feat. Chemistry is a hardcore album so sprawling you’d think they invented the word (sprawling, not hardcore). With touches of prog rock and shoegaze, multiple backup singers, and, reportedly, hundreds of guitar tracks, the album certainly stands alone amongst the others sitting next to it at the record store.

For this outing, Fucked Up recruited a handful of guest musicians to play the parts the band physically could not recreate on their own, but also, in what could hardly be described as unintentional collateral damage, in order to add some fanfare to the bill. Andrew W.K. supplied keyboard atmospherics on a few songs like “Golden Seal” and “Looking for God,” while Vivian Girls and Katie Stelmanis provided backup vocals on “No Epiphany” and “Royal Swan,” respectively. Though a person was necessary to play the keyboard parts of Chemistry live, Andrew W.K. was not; he brought little to the party. Vivian Girls, meanwhile, were nothing short of embarrassing. Their off-key singing and put-on ear holding, as if they were all “We Are The World,” detracted greatly from their song.

Fucked Up’s set would have been far more interesting without their accompanists. I would have rather seen the band make an attempt at playing some of their more progressive material with their current setup, or reinterpret the songs to fit it and fail, than to bring in these superfluous musicians who added so little. Still, Fucked Up, in and of themselves, put on a great show. Their transition into “Crusades” from “Black Albino Bones” made great strides to make up for the misdemeanors committed by their guest musicians.