G&P Review: Fuck the Facts

Fuck the Facts
Amer
Big Cartel
If you took a hammer to Fuck the Facts’ seven-song Amer EP, you could probably kludge together a halfway decent screamo/shoegaze jam from the remaining shards and a bit of Krazy Glue.
Amer’s first moments on “Une Triste Vue” run through a tinkling crystalline forest, like listening to Jesu on fast forward. But winter is coming and the night is dark and full of terrors. So as the snow drifts pile up, and you have a premonition this won’t end well. From there leap ahead three songs to the befogged bewilderment of “A Void.” Decisions have been made in the gloom, unthinkable, irrevocable. Another judicious use of fast forward will wrap you in the Vicodin overdose warmth of the second half of penultimate song “L'enclume et le Marteau” and its resignation in the face of death. Taken together those snippets make a suicidal triptych of longing and the inability to cope.
While that all makes for a great game of what-if, you’ll notice we’re skipping over a lot of material. You can’t really overlook the fact that grindcore is these Canadiens’ chosen avocation and that the four or five minutes of slow motion mopery you could stitch together out of the remnants of this 17 minute EP are far more interesting than anything that blasts a beat. Against the open veined crimson of Fuck the Fact’s extra-genre digressions, the actual grind feels as gray and rigor mortised as a week old corpse. There’s something lifeless behind the eyes when Fuck the Facts start blasting that leaves the grind portions wanting. While that can be a bit disappointing, there’s no denying Amer is ripe for a clever remixing.

[Full disclosure: the band sent me a download.]

A Bastard Noise: Power Violence Lives on in a New Generation

“No Comment! Manpig! Capitalist Casualties! Man is the Bastard! West Coast Power Violence! Let’s fucking go! Kick ass!”
And with that, the term power violence entered the hardcore lexicon. The loose confederation of California bands had little in common stylistically beyond a penchant for brevity. They certainly didn’t set out to spark a musical revolution. But 20 years after Man is the Bastard shouted the term into existence, a host of up and coming bands are taking what was once an inside joke to brand outcasts in the California hardcore scene and turning it into an ongoing and constantly evolving musical movement of its own.
Though the term power violence has been “commodified and bastardized” in the two decades since its introduction, Robby Komen of Sea of Shit still sees the spirit of that first run of bands in the wave of contemporary practitioners.
“It was definitely a time/era specific thing in its original incarnation (just like anything, it has to start somewhere), but I do believe there are contemporaries that earnestly share the same ethos and ideologies that unified these bands in the past,” Komen said.
Attracted by power violence’s aggression and malleability, a modern wave of neoviolence bands are taking short shocks of hardcore festooned with prominent bass and exploring all of the possible permutations, keeping it from going stale and extinct. Sprawling across the globe and adapting to fit new musical ecosystems, power violence is more vibrant and fertile than Man is the Bastard and their cohorts ever could have imagined.

G&P Review: Fuck the Facts

The sweat dripped from his forehead and ran down his cheeks. It welled at his throat and flowed down his chest. An inexhaustible reservoir of sweat.... If only, he thought, everything were inexhaustible this way--he would hardly need to exist as an independent, solid entity. It would be enough to be connected up with something, to be connected to the source of the stream. He'd been sure of that so far; but sources dwindle and dry up, and the more he sought to cling to them the farther, he suspected, they would recede into the distance.

Yukio Mishima
"Sword"
1963

Fuck the Facts
Die Miserable
Relapse
For a band declaring they're bound to Die Miserable, I just don't get the feeling that Canada's Fuck the Facts are all that perturbed by the prospect. Grindcore is supposed to be angry music; Fuck the Facts should rage, rage against the dying of that light a little bit more. Though they're consummately talented musicians, I struggled with Die Miserable's lack of heart. (This may be just a matter of not clicking with my tastes, so I recommend VII's ecstatic revelry in the album's praise.)
There's an unfortunate mechanical sterility to the drums that I know damn well were performed organically and that trickles through the entire performance. Every riff, scream, fill and bass run are technically on point and masterfully executed, but I kept wondering what someone like Landmine Marathon could have achieved with this batch of songs instead. Sure they'd shatter some of the finery, but the heart would be balls out (if that makes any sort of anatomical sense).
Die Miserable's clear highpoint is mid-album pivot "Census Blank," which succeeds in evoking that sense of impending apocalypse and annihilation via a maddeningly tapped central riff that would have done Botch-era Dave Knudson proud. It's like trying to decode a lifesaving Morse code message when all of the codebooks have been blanked out.
The rest of the songs left me cold, like the faux-Neurosis transcendental near-miss of the title track. I just kept expecting Fuck the Facts to deliver that truly knock out song that would define Die Miserable and, much like Godot, it just never showed up.
Brutal Truth are the patron saints of off-kilter grind, but they never lost sight of their titular adjective in pursuit of their nominal noun. Die Miserable pays pro forma tribute to the dread that must accompany the unknowable prospect of our own dissolution, but the emotions never dig deeper than the surface. Rather than dying miserable, this album leaves me thinking Fuck the Facts will die alone after a period of prolonged indifference just like the rest of us.

[Full disclosure: Fuck the Facts sent me a download.]

G&P Review: Fuck the Facts

Fuck the Facts
Unnamed EP
Self Released
Listening to Fuck the Facts’ self-released Unnamed EP is like hunting for inside joke Easter eggs in your favorite nerd cult film. The adventurous Canadian band nicks from and nods to a slew of metal moments past and present over the course of six short songs. “Time is a Dictator” plays the dreamy, contemplative guitar over brooding, whispered vocal card that was pretty much established and perfected by Celtic Frost 20 years ago while “.” rocks vaulting, athletic guitar runs over Bolt Thrower/Landmine Marathon riffs on fast forward. Brutalizer “La Tete hors de L’eau” is a rusted amalgam of brute force destruction and bent string agony that could have been penned by Luddite Clone or Kill the Slave Master.
While that’s fun, it’s also the EP’s most noticeable – but not fatal – Achilles’ heel. I’m so busy playing free association with their riffs I kind of forget to appreciate them on their own merits. However, when Fuck the Facts do retreat to their signature experimentation, you know the band has it in them.
The unsettling “Wake” is pierced by the faint, almost subliminal radio hum that unnerves the Martian atmosphere of the phased-out, trebly guitar bluffs.

Fuck the Facts – “Wake”

I’ve struggled with this one for a few weeks now because on the balance the songs are solidly written and get stuck in your craw like an impacted molar. But I keep expecting something more; there's some quintessence I just keep expecting to leap through my headphones. Fuck the Facts is one of those bands like Antigama I keep expecting to truly floor me, but I’m just not there yet. But leaving your audience hungry for more is never a bad career move. Fuck the Facts? Fuck me? Fuck it, I’ll play it again and maybe this time it will be there.

[Full disclosure: Fuck the Facts kindly provided me with a download.]