The fifth album from Toronto's Fucked Up, Dose Your Dreams could well be their best effort yet.
Dose Your Dreams is an incredible piece of work that at the very least rivals their previous bests, if not surpassing them. That is an extremely high bar to clear but they’ve managed it, purely by their never ending desire to keep pushing themselves and their music forward with confidence and a swagger that hardly any other act in recent times has managed to maintain.
Dose Your Dreams is yet another jump into the unknown where the group not only flirt with other genres but jump in, break them down and rebuild as they see fit before emerging unscathed from the mire.
Dose Your Dreams is by far the most over-the-top album the band have ever created and shows they aren't satisfied with pumping out subpar material or rehashing what they've done.
At once their most dizzyingly complex and accessible album, Fucked Up’s fifth LP feels like the full delivery on a promise scattered over four excellent albums and a number of 7” and 12” singles and EPs. Dose Your Dreams represents a new high-water mark for the band, and for 21st-century post-hardcore punk.
For their fifth LP ‘Dose Your Dreams’, the Toronto collective are again pushing their sonic envelope as far as it can go.
It's probably premature to call Dose Your Dreams Fucked Up's masterpiece, but most bands would be very lucky to make something this daring and accomplished once in their careers, let alone twice.
Fucked Up's Dose Your Dreams compensates for its conceptual emptiness with a sound that blasts on all fronts.
There’s a Gatsby-like void at the center of Dose Your Dreams—it’s a big party, but it’s unclear who or what exactly is being celebrated.
Anchored by Damian Abraham’s vocal barrage, Fucked Up crank through a wide-ranging repertoire of hardcore, punk, psych, krautrock and funk.
Fortunately, Dose Your Dreams proves they’ve got a deep enough bag of tricks—including a towering throng of endless overdubs and genre detours that sound as massive as the band’s ambitions—to make even conventionality sound compelling.
There are moments where Dose Your Dreams’ ambition dips, the record’s first third clogged up in narrative and a relatively forgettable run of less boundary-pushing numbers. Above all, though, it’s a record that proves Fucked Up are still guitar music’s greatest anything-goes innovators: punk in spirit, if not always in sound.
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