David Comes To Life is a bit of an enigma. The Canadian sextet's third album has been critically lauded and claims a devoted following across the internet. With eighteen tracks totaling over an hour of music, ***ed Up have likely created the longest album in hardcore.
David is also likely the loftiest album in hardcore, boasting a confusing and convoluted plot that is undoubtedly the best plot ever written.
At least, that's what ***ed Up's innumerable fans want you to believe. The plot is a four act play about a man named David who is in love with a woman named Veronica. She dies, and then the plot falls apart; the fourth wall is pulled down with the same alarming sense of alacrity shown by those who pulled down the iconic Berlin wall, David is revealed to be a figment of the narrator's imagination, or so I believe. It's nowhere near as cohesive or relatable as ***ed Up's fanbase insinuate. The vocals are also very homogenous. Pink Eyes has the same yell throughout the album, and when the backup vocals come in, it's a relief, as there's finally something to break the monotony.
But, this is hardcore. Most don't listen to hardcore for the lyrics - as long as there's a few phrases that stick out ("Dying on the inside" comes to mind) the lyrics can just be ignored as long as the instrumentation is good. For the most part, it is. ***ed Up has three guitarists, and while they're redundant at times, there is an immense amount of riffing. The licks are ubiquitous, being repeated, and played off one another, ***ed Up's guitar work is fantastic. However, the novelty wears off after a few songs as the songs continue to drag on for minutes past their prime; this could theoretically be attributed to ***ed Up having so many good ideas that every song is just goddamn
jam-packed with ideas; or, as is the actual case, the songs are just too long for their own good. What was new, fresh, amazing, and ground-breaking two minutes ago is suddenly mind-numbingly boring - and this happens with astonishing frequency; every single song is longer than three minutes, and a grand total of eight run for longer than four and a half minutes.
***ed Up does have plenty of great ideas, but they're so repetitive that any sense of wonder is gone after the sixteenth time the riff has repeated, or the point when you realize that they've been playing the same chord progression for four minutes. The album is in dire need of a higher entity to just cut the damn thing down by about half an hour. The amazing ideas they do have aren't quite amazing enough to outweigh the major flaws presented by
David.
