Toronto six-piece Fucked Up long ago cast off the shackles of hardcore punk orthodoxy, their wildly experimental songs defying easy categorisation. Dose Your Dreams is a sequel of sorts to 2011 concept album David Comes to Life, with that record’s titular character this time embarking on a metaphysical odyssey at the suggestion of an elderly woman whose lover had long ago disappeared into a void. As happens. The soaring ambition isn’t confined to the narrative. Dose Your Dreams is a dizzying mix of styles, often within the same song: witness the way Mechanical Bull’s glitchy electronica segues into Damian Abraham’s unreconstructed bellowing. (Indeed, the more the rest of the band broaden their horizons, the more constricting Abraham’s one-dimensional voice – perfectly suited to their earlier, more route-one material – seems to become.)
Elsewhere, Mike Haliechuk and Jonah Falco’s huge washes of multi-layered guitars, first introduced on 2008’s The Chemistry of Common Life, still dominate, but they are augmented by piano, violin, synths, frantic drum machines (Accelerate), motorik rhythms (Joy Stops Time) and disco inflections (the title track), not to mention the more ambient moments throughout. And yet for all its undoubted envelope-pushing, Dose Your Dreams is hampered by a lack of strong songs, the punchy House of Keys and more reflective The One I Want Will Come for Me aside. Ultimately, it’s an album to admire rather than love.
