''Year Of The Rat''

Only a broken mind can understand that life's a trap when you're a rat.

Sleeve - Front

Sleeve - back

Vinyl - Printed labels
See below for stamped variants

Stats: 

Tracks: Year Of The Rat B/W First Born
Year: 2009
Label: Whats Your Rupture?
Matrix A ?0109 A
Matrix B ?0109 B

Pressing Info: 
3000 12"s

300 With white labels, most stamped, some with and without sleeves

No Test Pressings

(Thank you to Kevin Pedersen for the pressing info!)

Inserts:
Lyric sheet as above

Variants:

• Regular - Printed labels, picture sleeve
• Stamped - White labels hand-stamped in black ink, picture sleeve
• 'Test Press' - Same as above stamped version, but with generic white 'DJ' sleeve and no insert. Made available at shows before the artwork was available, subsequently misidentified by 2nd hand market and sold as test pressings.
• Blue Stamp & Other Stamp Variants - White labels. A handful are stamped with blue, rather than black ink, there might also be a few with purple ink. The colours don't have a use / meaning and maybe just came about because the black ink was running out. The one pictured below came with a picture sleeve. There are also a few with blank labels that should have been stamped, but got missed...

Stamped labels - 'A' Side

Stamped labels - 'B Side'

Blue Stamp - there seem to be a handful of these out there.

'Test Press'(i.e. Vinyl and labels same as other stamped variants, but with generic DJ sleeve and no insert.
The one on the left is the special 'upside down logo' variant...)

From LFG Jan 23 2009: Finally, some of you may have noticed that in New York and Philadelphia, a few copies of the Year of the Rat 12" accidentally slipped into existence. If you got one, you are lucky. The rest will be released with a real cover and etc around the same time as No Epiphany, and we should have both in time for the UK tour in March.

Notes:

From FU Merch Table: 3rd in the series of releases coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac. 'Rat' is a Krautrock-influenced 12 minute blast with a massive finish. Recorded in the same studio as "What's The Story, Morning Glory?" in London and mixed in Toronto. The b-side is an original which treads somewhere between ugly glam and an FU take on Thin Lizzy style guitar harmonies.




Mixed Metaphors (Years of Rats):
Rats have appeared several times in the Fucked Up story; a few previous examples are outlined below, along with the usual cut and pasted random quotes. Some might be relevant to this release.

In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture.[1]

Dream of life on the other side.

The "Baiting The Public" artwork was discussed in a LFG post dated December 2010:

The front image is meant to be a metaphor for what we thought we were in punk, and what punk was in the world (we were really into punk at that point) - a pack of rats running over a proper looking young woman in bed.

The proper looking young woman is asleep, her body is present, but her mind, if it's active at all, is in a dream state, she's oblivious to the rats running over her in the real world. The LFG post goes on to describe the record as being a tribute to the actionist and situationist movements - the following is cropped from Wikipedia:

 Another important concept of situationist theory was... the construction of situations, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.[1]

Hunch my back and bear my teeth,
I'll kill you to get the things I need.

"Dance Of Death" repeated the use of sleeping woman imagery, this time the subject is passively accepting death and the song is about...

...the imperialist lifestyle and how its been perfect and reproduced to such a dazzling extent, that people within it are convinced that it is the best way, and that they love it. Its like Stockholm Syndrome, when a captive begins to love and revered the captor. The Harbinger’s spiders laid their eggs inside all of our heads, and convinced us to keep dancing in the muck, because we love it.

"Year of The Rat" seems to take on these themes, in describing the rat race from the rat's perspective.

The push for more provokes the greed,

I struggle for the space to breathe.

Tails connect and pull apart
Friends whose tails strangle the hearts
of friends whose tails are wrapped around
The necks of friends together bound.

Moving on to the Fucked Up / Haymaker Split , which combined rat and Nazi imagery, this time probably referencing state propaganda and the Pied Piper of Hamelin...

The Pied Piper also featured in the first ever post on the Looking For Gold Site, the post is copied below, for posterity:

RATS

They fought the dogs and killed the cats,

And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats,

And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,

Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,

And even spoiled the women's chats

By drowning their speaking

With shrieking and squeking

In fifty different Sharps and flats

Welcome to the FUCKED UP log.

Going back a step, the Haymaker split references Philip K Dick's "Black Iron Prison", which could describe the imperialist lifestyle:

Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.

This ball of fear that grows together,

The want for freedom becomes the tether.

A thousand rats and appetites pull,

A thousand ways to bind it tighter.

Take my chance to grab an inch,

When something snares me I don't flinch.

When it pulls I just pull back,

I feel my liberty losing slack.

The fade out on the YOTR includes the "You'd better be prepared to pull the trigger" quote from John Mcain, which maybe expands the rat-race theme to its natural conclusion on the world stage. Likewise the "47   05" on the above insert might reference May 1947, the start of the cold war arms race. Or maybe not.

Reaching up to touch the sky,
The sun, the centre of my mind.

The End
The last ever post on Looking for Gold was David Eliade's top 10 list of Fucked Up Songs. Baiting the Public and Year of The Rat are 1 & 2. (It might not be the last post forever, but it was the last post before a long break)


And Finally
Rats Love Music, became a real thing with the release of this record (according to the credits). Rats Love Music is a subsidary of Hidden World Enterprises

One last thing...

Only a broken mind can understand

That life's a trap when you're a rat.

''Crooked Head''

My trajectory is so true, they float away and I don't move...

Sleeve Front:
Tribal kids  

Vinyl - Side A:
Label repeats sleeve image

Sleeve - Back:
Western kids

Vinyl - Side A:
Label repeats sleeve image

Insert - Crooked Head: 
Dog eat dog / Dogs fighting over a bone. This together with the other images can be (mis) interpreted as a comparison and contrast of western global culture with indigenous tribal cultures. 

Insert - I Hate Summer:
Continuing the 'two heads' theme... 

Stats:

General:
Tracks: Crooked Head B/W I Hate Summer
Released: 2008
Label: Matador Records OLE 837-7
Matrix A: OLE 837-7-A         GOLDEN
Matrix B: OLE 837-7-B          GOLDEN

Pressing Info:
First pressing 2500 on August 11, 2008
Second pressing 500 on January 23, 2009

Inserts: Regular insert as pictured above
Variants: No variants

LFG Post April 16 2008:

Crooked Sombrero

CrOoKed hEad

Colour cover:
Fake or rejected sleeve showing (Amazonian?) tribal people.

Extract From Record Release Announcement - LFG Post (September 28 2008)

...Say, but haven't all the last records we've released been "total bullshit"? Like Year of the Dog, and Year of the Pig, and all those YOTP 7"'s and shit, and Toronto FC, and David Christmas, and all that stuff? Well yeah, but this one is different! The ASIDE is from the new ALBUM, but its an EDIT, which means its a bit different, but not in any sort of way that cost us any more money to make in the studio, and then the BSIDE is this killer little tune that isn't on ANY OTHER RECORD OUT THERE, and is about how Damian hates summer because, well you can read the LYRICS! They are INCLUDED on the INSERT, which is a little piece of paper stuck into the 7" sleeve that has the lyrics on it, as well as the LINER NOTES. THE SONG IS REALLY SHORT, its like less than 2 and a half minutes long, and its PRETTY FAST and SORT OF SOUNDS LIKE THE UNDERTONES because we use that drum beat we used on TEENAGE PROBLEMS and NEAT PARTS and maybe one other song in our discography. Anyhow, this 7" is 100% NOT BULLSHIT except for the fact that the aside is already on the album, but not really, as I was just talking about, but its got its own ARTWORK, and the bside art looks a little like the album cover because its got the sun in there and everything, and I can tell you now that we're gonna make a bunch more 7"'s that have the sun on the cover, so you might want to start COLLECTING them ALL so that if you ever want to make that VIDEO I was talking about WAY before, you won't be missing the CROOKED HEAD 7", which is now for sale over at MATADOR RECORDS and pretty much no other websites I could really find on google.


Review By Norman Records: 
Good stuff really and you've got to admire the picture of two dogs ripping each others' faces off on the insert.




Crooked Head (Cropped From Wikipedia)

Spoiler: They don't collect records
The Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives. As of 2010, they number 420 individuals. The Pirahã people do not call themselves Pirahã but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi, roughly translated as "the straight ones".

The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language. They call any other language “Crooked head.”

As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.

Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; you simply don't tell other people what to do. There appears to be no social hierarchy; the Pirahã have no formal leaders. Their social system can thus be labelled as primitive communism, in common with many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of agriculture before Western contact (see history of the Amazon).

Their culture is remarkably economical. For example, they use canoes every day for fishing and for crossing the river that they live beside. However, when their canoes wear out, they simply use pieces of bark as temporary canoes. Everett brought in a master builder who taught and supervised the Pirahã in making a canoe, so that they could make their own. But when they needed another canoe, they said that "Pirahã do not make canoes" and told Everett he should buy them a canoe. The Piraha rely on neighboring tribes' canoe work, and use those canoes for themselves.

Pirahã build simple huts where they keep a few pots, pans, knives, and machetes. They make only scraping implements (for making arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, bows, and arrows. They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night.

They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (hard). They do not store food in any quantity, but generally eat it when they get it. Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking.They cultivate manioc plants that grow from spit-out seeds and make only a few days' worth of manioc flour at a time.They trade Brazil nuts and sex for consumables or tools, e.g. machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey. Chastity is not a cultural value. They trade Brazil nuts, wood, and sorva (rubbery sap used in chewing gum) for soda-can pull-tabs, which are used for necklaces. Men wear T-shirts and shorts that they get from traders; women sew their own plain cotton dresses.

Their decoration is mostly necklaces, used primarily to ward off spirits. The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines. However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.

According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god, and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made. However, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people.Everett reported one incident where the Pirahã said that “Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle.” Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirahã insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach.

Commodity Fetishism:

Test Pressing on RHS (probably)

Test Pressing on LHS