fuck

fuck

The Band

Vampire Blues

Presenting fuck’s first new record in over ten years, the band, on Vampire Blues! In the mid-’90s to the early aughts, fuck was releasing a new record every other year and touring constantly while jumping from label to label. Then, with nary a warning, they up and disappeared. No note, no nothing. Skip forward a generation and it’s revealed that they’ve been spending all these years meticulously sculpting the most impressive album of their career. Recorded in fits and starts and all over the map, from basic tracks in San Francisco to overdubs in Italy and mixing in Memphis, the band comes through with a surprisingly cohesive sound; though, like their six previous studio albums, the genre-bending and boundary-pushing song-writing continues. Any lesser band would have destroyed all sense of spontaneity going this route; not fuck. The casual off-the-cuff attitude remains, but now with added depth and clarity. The highs got higher, the hard hits harder. And it only took ten years!

fuck

Baby Loves A Funny Bunny

Vampire Blues

For fuck’s 1996 sophomore release, the band got sophomoric: the playing got more playful, and the lyrics got more nonsensical. Yet, from late-night confessional “Swinger” to the bare-boned sigh of “Whimper and Cry,” the band still embraces languor and melancholia.Unlike the band’s even-handed debut album, Pretty... Slow, this batch of songs careens multi-directionally— toy piano and baby grand! “Rococo” pops, “Tired” rocks, “Loosened Mind?” ups the weird, and “Talent, OR” goes full CinemaScope. From realizing “I am almost like a girl” to the hope that “black and white will soon be brown and gold” on their ode to Neil Young (“Ballet High”), the future of identity politics is nailed in 2:27. Think Jonathan Richman’s whimsical sincerity battling the obfuscation of Erik Satie: Baby Loves A Funny Bunny imbues both yin and yang. Schizo? Maybe. Let’s call it delightfully unpredictable.

fuck

Pretty...slow

Vampire Blues

For the first time ever a vinyl version of the fuck classic Pretty…slow is being reissued! Originally released on compact disc in 1996, it was a fanboy wet dream: a hand-numbered, limited-edition small cardboard box stuffed with candy, tiny toys, crayons and a coloring book. The music, like the packaging, showed the same DIY anything-goes attitude—lyrics like “She came home to runaway...” are completely upended by the demented howl of a brutalized violin on “Monkey Does His Thing,” while “Shotgun Hours” is like a Lou Reed meets Townes Van Zandt death-song. Back then, everybody wanted a copy but the band could never keep up with the demand. Twenty years on, Vampire Blues’ vinyl edition of Pretty…slow ensures that every boy and girl can get the fuck they deserve.

fuck

Cupid's Cactus

Smells Like Records

After releasing two CDs on their own, two more through Matador, and a cottage industry's worth of singles and comp appearances, Fuck, the band, has come to SLR to release their latest full-length album, Cupid's Cactus. With stylistic nods to out-rock architects like Can and Meat Puppets, and a pop sense that owes as much to the Platters as the Pixies, the album hazily unfolds its majestic mojo in a 35-minute, 15-song serenade of soulful indie rock. The production boasts a bone-dry intimacy, and the performances - twin-guitar click-and-drone, whispered vox, and unique hat-bass dances - make the band's best case yet for the supremacy of subtlety, space, and inspired song-sense within the rock idiom.  From Oakland, Calfornia, Ted Ellison plays electric bass guitar, Tim Prudhomme rhythm guitar and harmonica, Geoff Soule electric lead guitar, Kyle Statham drums, and all four of the boys sing. Fuck, the band, also works piano, hammond organ, tambourine, mouth organ, Arabian bongos and claves into their act.