Our good-faith assumption that the slow placidity of part one of this ultimately 5-hour epic was a means of introduction turns out to have been wisely made. Year of the Monkey, the second part of Fucked Up‘s quintuple-album-length trilogy also comprising its second and third hours, takes the increased eventfulness of “Rivers and Lakes,” the closing track of Year of the Goat, and builds from there as the base. “Looking for Heaven and Not Finding It,” opens with the striking of a temple bowl, a common preface to Buddhist prayer, as all of the tracks of this cycle have thus far. The following half-hour is spent in the land of light charted by Yes, with major-key joy and brimming golden dewdrops sprinkled everywhere. This is fitting: the story at this point features Monkey, or Sun Wukong, attempting to find a way into heaven aside from the front gate, with the music acting as visions of the lakes and gardens and pavilions of that golden resplendence.
Fucked Up by this point have not just referenced prog but played it enough that it no longer comes across as a hardcore band spreading their wings but rather a prog band showing their comfort over a polyphony of styles, such that when Hüsker Dü-informed post-hardcore arrives as always, it feels like a well-cued musical shift rather than a retreat back to the known. The confidence the band displays here is awe-inspiring especially due to the already-apparent complexity of the work; no longer do they feel like a band playing at the ragged edge of their ability but now like a masterful group simply following the story as they may.
The next hour, comprised of the two songs “Before Us Tigers Stood” and “Monkey Meets the Dragon,” features musical callbacks to motifs established in those previous Zodiac releases, a fact that will please anyone who’s committed those many hours of material to wield against this 5-hour ultra-Wagnerian close. The impact of the songs however is not predicated on the understanding of the complex inner mythology of the Zodiac series; Fucked Up wisely deploy clear hooks and obvious drama, letting the mood of the piece arrive from itself rather than outside, leaving those little references as pleasing treats for the attentive rather than requisites to appreciate the work. These two pieces drama more obviously from heavy metal, sounding quite often like pastiches of Iron Maiden’s current prog metal triple-guitar era, especially with the intertwining lyrical guitar melodies. The band’s practice with explicitly metal performance on both the Oberon EP as well as on Year of the Horse provide a powerful bed for them to draw from.
What surprises is the wide-eyed use of synthesizers and sequencers, drawing from the same post-prog space as M83 and Metric, when bands that pushed the progressive edge began to resolve their work back toward clear pop composition. The band once dabbled in this form on Dose Your Dreams but here it feels less like an affect to sustain an album and more just another place for the camera eye to go. It’s hard not to get more than a whiff of Rush over the expanse, not just in the macroscale composition held together by approachable melodicism, but also in the particular hopefulness of the melodic sensibility. These songs seem to sparkle and gleam in their joy, even as Monkey finds himself enmeshed in greater and greater peril posed by, you guessed it, Tiger and Dragon, representing two of the four winds guarding heaven. Isolated to just these two pieces alone, the Grass Can Move Stones project would have proven its worth as an exercise in the limitlessness of prog and the endless inventiveness of hardcore and alternative musicians.
“Empty is the Hand,” the closing piece, repeats the swirling dramatics of Year of the Horse, gesturing finally to the alchemical and occult themes that have underpinned Fucked Up’s work since their earliest days. That the narrative here, as everywhere it seems in Fucked Up’s catalog, is an allegorical one analyzing archetype and function should be pretty obvious; otherwise the grabdiloquence of the whole thing falls apart under its own ludicrousness. But it is precisely Fucked Up’s commitment to the Wagnerian sweep of this project, comfortably putting away time scales that would sit nicely next to Der Ring des Nibelungen, that makes it so enthralling. The middle of this epic breaks into a nasty and violent mix of death metal and sludge metal, executed to such delightful perfection that it raises the question why the band doesn’t work in this style more often.
After an opening hour that felt like a mere prelude, they have committed the second and third hours to a hybrid of heavy metal, prog, space rock, psychedelia, hardcore, kosmiche, raga rock and alternative rock that feels effervescent and invigorating, delivering on the promise of a similar hybrid offered by The Mars Volta years ago to scattered success or that “Reoccurring Dreams” from Zen Arcade sketched out for the alternative crowd forty years ago now. That Year of the Monkey ends on a cliffhanger should be expected, given that there are two hours left to go, but it still hurts nonetheless.
Perhaps Year of the Monkey will be revealed to have benefited from the Empire Strikes Back effect, being the second in a trilogy neither has to set itself up or offer a coherent conclusion, freeing it to pursue the primacy of drama. It still remains difficult to judge this project as a totality given so much remains to be seen of it, four further tracks comprising the concluding two hours of this wild epic that itself is the close of a 12-album cycle produced over roughly 20 years. As it stands now, however, Year of the Monkey is not only an exceptional continuation of the Grass Can Move Stones meta-epic but also perhaps the best Fucked Up record yet, sitting next to Year of the Horse, The Chemistry of Common Life and David Comes to Life as a viable answer to that only ever-increasingly impossible question. From:
https://www.treblezine.com/fucked-up-year-of-the-monkey-review/
