Fucked Up – Glass Boys (Matador)

Fucked Up – Glass Boys (Matador)

“Warm Change,” the fifth song on Glass Boys, ends with a two-minute guitar solo and organ wash that could pass for the Who jamming in a basketball arena. The album is mostly more brutal than that, an onslaught of shimmering melodic guitars, shrill howls, and echo-booming drums that sounds like aging punk scrubbing his filthy conscience with the most majestic Brillo pad. Yet even as they scaled back their operatic ambitions in favor of (relatively) short, (relatively) sweet jolts of behemoth hardcore, there was an unmistakable classic rock swagger to Fucked Up’s latest. The end result suggested that Damian Abraham’s demons look a lot like Monsters Of Rock. –Chris [LISTEN]