Like 2011’s David Comes to Life, Dose Your Dreams, the fifth record from incomparable Canadian hardcore omnivores Fucked Up, is a heavily conceptual album. It is staggering in both scope and stretch.
But where David Comes to Life was the portrait of the artists as a young band, Dose Your Dreams is Fucked Up’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce’s masterwork, it’s a dense and sprawling text marked by intricate nuance and complexity. Its stream-of-consciousness narrative is so stuffed with characters and tangential ideas that it should really come with footnotes.
(Indyweek review)
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| Towers: The jumping off point of more than one story. |
FOOTNOTES # 1.
A Prologue: High Rise / Tower on Time
—Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
—Yes, my love?
—How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
The doors swing open (our hero enters, the happy office worker, his time fully filled by a fulfilling job. David is not named, but his familiar presence is felt in his straightforward delivery, apparent misplaced enthusiasm and the sense his happiness is fleeting. Mircea Eliade (David's mum) suggests this might be because repetition emptied of its religious content necessarily leads to a pessimistic vision of existence.) and the smell is back, (recalling the way David perceives things in The Other Shoe: "Love the smell but I hate the taste")
One deep breath in
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| High Rise |
and I know I'm on track (the start of a journey, or maybe just stuck in a rut. Also recalls the video for the earlier song as does the next line):
Past the security towards the elevator (The Other Shoe video presented a descending lift, suggesting it was heading to the basement / his subconscious. This time the lift is going up - to the real world of business.)
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| Blue vinyl |
The Sun is peaking out...
The doors wave open (Doors connect the different worlds in Ulysses, here they emphasise the changing spatial experience, between outside, the lift and the office - the spaces that absorb his time. They also introduce a door / portal motif which is a recurring theme on the LP.
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| Open those strange old doors... this is where you'll find... |
18 Little Moons
on the wall of the lift...
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and he's a Numbers Analyst,
so...)
Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?
Because some years previously...he had learned of the existence of a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e.g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9.
(Ulysses)
So go Bloom's thoughts in the penultimate episode of Ulysses. "The divine part of Bloom is simply his humanity - his assumption of a bond between himself and other created being." David waves at the secretary, waves, sea, islands, water.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range admire?
(Ulysses)
(David's thoughts include the sun, air (breath) and water, the basic elements of life, a Trinity.)
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| L-R: Molly, Stephen and Leopold (Fight it don't feel it - Kudos to Pitchfork for the insight) |
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| Trinity |
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly, shadowing Trinity's surly front.(Ulysses)
Trinity's surly front (Artistic licence)
Have you seen the movie High Rise, based on the Ballard book?(M. Haliechuk interview)
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| Coice? A nod to all the typos on the classic early FU 7"s. |
(David comes to life again, he willingly takes on the role of office worker, paying for his house with his life-time. When he dies, they'll bring him flowers (Blooms) and set him back on track as the Christ figure (The cross word), but this time everything's.... fine? He's going to find Joyce).
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| Lloyd in a Void |
High Rise, 2.42 duration, first heard on 15th May, first impression: nice but doesn't sound like FU, subsequently filed away. Replayed 7 months later, it's warmly familiar, the soundtrack of a childhood memory. Time, time, write on time...
