As announced last week, our ninth Buy Early Get Now promotion goes live today, for the new Fucked Up album, David Comes To Life.
You can preorder NOW via mail order from the Matador Store, preorder in person or mail order from any participating retailer on this map, or if you are in the UK or Europe, from our UK store.
Wherever you preorder, you will be given a code that lets you log in to buyearlygetnow.com, where you can download your extras and early album stream/download. If you preorder physical goods, those will be available for you to pick up at the store you bought it from, or shipped to your house if you’ve mail ordered, according to the schedule below:
NOW Instant download of 5 non-album tracks plus the 3 digital singles already released MAY 10-13 (EARLY) Full 192k album stream and high-quality album download in 4 parts, one per day JUNE 7 (RELEASE DATE) Pick up the physical album and poster at the store you preordered from, or if you mail ordered, delivered to your door, plus a download of the Record Store Day Exclusive ‘David’s Town’ LP JUNE 28 The 4 bonus 7″es are available for pick up / delivered to your door (or as MP3s/FLACs if you ordered the all-digital package)
In addition, we released the third single from the album (of 4), “Ship Of Fools,” today. The first 30 people to respond to a Facebook post / tweet made at noon yesterday were overnighted CDRs of the track:
Remember back when we told you that Fucked Up had a new album on the horizon? Well that time is racing towards us faster than you can say “Byrdesdale Spa FC.” However we’ve still got a little ways to go before the June 7 street date. But alas! We’ve found a way to not only get you the whole album early but for you to score a bunch of exclusive content. We’re talking bonus 7″es, non-album tracks, posters.
The time has come for us to welcome back our dear old (and newly trademarked) friend Buy Early Get Now.
For its ninth birthday, Buy Early Get Now is getting the Fucked Up treatment and by placing a pre-order via mail order directly from us*or at a trusted local independent retailer for David Comes To Life on CD or 2xLP beginning Tuesday April 26, you’ll get the following:
- Instant download of 5 non-album songs plus the pre-album digital singles as MP3s on April 26.
- A full 192k album stream and hi-quality album download in 4 parts over 4 days from May 10-13.
- The CD or 2xLP and exclusive poster mailed to your house via Matastore or available to pick up on June 7.
- Download of Record Store Day Exclusive David’s Town comp on June 7.
- 4 bonus 7″es of 7 extra non-album songs available to pick up on June 28.
And, as always, if you don’t live anywhere near a participating retailer, you can always pre-order David Comes To Life directly from the Matador Store.
For more info on Buy Early Get Now click HERE or email buyearlygetnow@matadorrecords.com for more details.
The somewhat unimaginative (but guaranteed to sell out) Reading and Leeds festivals just got a lot better with the addition of Cold Cave and Fucked Up for the end of summer UK weekend festival.
Fucked Up play the NME/Radio 1 tent (Leeds – Friday, Reading – Sunday), whilst Cold Cave play the dance tent (Reading – Friday, Leeds – Saturday) . Interpol were announced previously and play way up the bill on the main stage (Leeds – Friday, Reading – Sunday).
For a full line-up and tickets head to the Reading or Leeds official websites.
All bands have extensive tours ahead of this, click to check the upcoming tour dates of Cold Cave, Fucked Up and Interpol.
Today Fucked Up release the second of four singles from the upcoming album David Comes To Life. Entitled “A Little Death,” the song is track 13 out of 18. Its urgent tone plays against an underlying tale of resignation and defeat, and showcases a different side of this insanely multilayered album from the first single released a couple of weeks ago.
Appropriately enough, the band will be celebrating the release of this (sad?) single with a free show at the ACE Hotel in Palm Springs after Coachella ends tonight. They will be performing multiple songs from the new album. Doors open at midnight. Come and get a free postcard containing more information on the story.
If you can’t make it out to the desert, catch them at the Echoplex in LA tomorrow night. Tickets are only $5.
* To avoid confusion, these singles are DIGITAL singles. There will be plenty of REAL singles coming for you collectors.
Stay tuned for the release of single number 3 on Tuesday, April 26.
Photo credit: Jake Giles Netter (Fucked Up at Matador 21)
We’re excited to report that Fucked Up will be playing Terminal 5 on Thursday, June 23, supporting Dinosaur Jr. (who will be performing Bug in its entirety)!! Also on the bill are OFF! and Henry Rollins (interviewing Dino Jr. live). Ticket on-sale begins this Friday.
In addition, Fucked Up will also be headlining the Echoplex in LA on Saturday, April 16. Ticketing information to follow shortly so keep your eyes peeled for updates. And as previously reported, the band are playing the Ace Hotel, Palm Springs on Friday, April 15.
RSVP to The Ace Hotel show here This show is free and open to the public. Capacity is limited. First come first serve!
To celebrate the release of the second of four singles from their upcoming album David Comes To Life, Fucked Up will be playing a midnight show at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs on Friday, April 15. This is of course during the weekend of the Coachella Festival. The digital single is called “A Little Death” and will be available both here on the Matablog and on iTunes on that Friday.
To be perfectly frank, we thought about blowing off Record Store Day this year. It’s not that we don’t support record stores – far from it, it’s what 37 of 38 employees prefer – but the huge glut of supposedly limited-edition releases, the scrum to get to the counter in the morning, and then the instant reappearance of many of the records on eBay at inflated sums are all an unintended and unwelcome side-effect of the event.
That said, we couldn’t help ourselves, and neither could three of our artists, so we proudly announce the following limited-edition items. They’re all awesome, they’re all limited, and if you don’t succeed on getting your hands on them on Record Store Day, just remember that the prices on eBay will (most likely) come down over time.
SO, on Saturday, April 16, Matador will have the following RSD exclusives:
From Byrdesdale Garden City in the UK comes the compilation album DAVID’S TOWN. Featuring 11 unreleased tracks from local bands including Gacy and the Boys, Animal Man, Grain and Hateful Coil, in styles varying from DIY to post-punk to power pop, this limited edition from FU-Discs was recorded in Byrdesdale between 1976 and 1979 and not released until now. An essential document of a thriving scene.
Next comes the new 7″ single from THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS, “Moves.” Currently moving up the radio charts, and of course featured in Tom Scharpling’s genius video for the track, it comes with the unreleased B-side “Drug Deal Of The Heart,” recorded at the sessions for the album Together. (Note: the band is playing Coachella on RSD weekend, and then will tour out of there through April and May.)
Finally we have the new 12″ from ESBEN AND THE WITCH, the great trio from Brighton, UK – many of you will have seen one of their great shows at SXSW this month. They just wrapped up their US tour and returned to their homeland. The single is the radio edit of “Chorea” and features a remix of their pounding classic “Eumenides” by Stuart Braithwaite of MOGWAI, along with an entirely unreleased 18-minute version of “Corridors” recorded for The Creators Project and only played at a special installation in London for Karl Sadler‘s Lit Forest. (Note: Esben return to the road in the UK starting this Friday.)
As usual, we will be taking down our webstore in observation of Record Store Day. Get out there, get in line, and spend some money, goddammit!!!
Right from the start, Toronto’s Fucked Up have been pushing musical and conceptual boundaries. Their third album, the 18-song, 78-minute David Comes To Life is a rock opera, an album set to a play. Though no less monumental, it is far more melodic than their breakthrough The Chemistry of Common Life. There are more female vocals, which work in perfect contrast to Damian Abraham’s highly effective wounded bull growl. The band sound tighter, with more space for the flourishes and imaginative songwriting that entwine their love of fey British indie pop with heavy riffing, and some genuinely twisted turns. Perhaps most grippingly, the triple-guitar interplay between Mike Haliechuk, Josh Zucker and Ben Cook has risen to symphonic levels. They channel musicians from Angus Young, Pete Townshend and Noel Gallagher to Bob Stinson and Lyle Preslar with ease and grace.
As for the story – more on that to come.
Here is the first of four DIGITAL singles that will be released from the album leading up to its June 7 release date. It’s entitled The Other Shoe, and you can get it here:
Later this week Fucked Up will be needing to change up their winter wear for something a little cooler as they head down to the summery southern hemisphere as they join the Soundwave Festival around Australia. Seeing as they’re going to be around that neck of the woods they’ll also be heading over to Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore to sample to sites and play some shows.
Hi, our new album is finished. You may remember last time we finished a full length album I made a funny post that counterposed the mastered CD I got sent in the mail by the mastering company against a screen shot from my laptop computer of 2001 “A Space Odyssey” where the earth is eclipsing the moon and the moon is being eclipsed by the sun at the same time or something, and then put the CDR right on the screen as if it was eclipsing the entire thing. A lot of you probably didn’t understand what was going on in the picture, especially because I posted the lyrics from the title track that contains shit like “The Vale the midwife birth the key”, which I myself don’t even really understand. Then I posted a link where you could download the entire album, but it was actually a link to the newly released album by the band Cut Copy, and I guess a lot of people fell for it because there were a lot of nasty comments to that particular post, and this was before people only came to this blog to make fun of me. Nowaways Cut Copy is really famous, and we’re just semi-famous, so who really won? Anyhow, this is not a competition. Especially since our album would later go on to receive a score of 8.8 on popular website “pitchfork” and their new album only got an 8.6. But anyhow, the fact that as many people fell for that as did is kind of a bummer – why would we release our new album for free on our blog the day we got it back from the mastering plant?
Back to the point, fast forward to the present and we have another completely full length album. It’s more than 3 years later and a lot of things have changed since I made the original Chemcom post. For one, there are no longer such things as “CDR’s”. In case you are of average age (17) and have no idea what these are – they were little floppy plastic circular disks that stored music and video games made for PC computers (“personal computers”, kind of pre-cursor devices to ipods that were used to download mp3s from sites like “kazaa” and facilitate the playing of such games as “solitaire”). Back in those days when you needed to store and transport large amounts of data (less than 700 megabytes) you would open up a program like “toast” and spend 25 minutes “burning” a CDR – that is, putting the data right onto the physical disk. Then you would put the disc in the “mail” and after 2 or 3 weeks the disc would arrive at some other location on planet earth.
Well that’s what happened with our last record. It got mastered somewhere in America, and a few weeks later the album-containing disc was delivered to my hand by a Canadian mail-delivery person, and I inserted it into my “cd player” (a device used to listen to music on these cds) and played it until I got bored (about 14 minutes later) at which point I continued to use up the “telephone” “land-line” to search for techno mp3s on “soulseek”.
Today I was sent a copy of our new album by an ftp server and loaded it right onto my ipod. I’m not even sure that it touched my desktop on its way to its final place of rest. It was mastered at 8.37pm on February 7th 2011 and at 11.11pm on February 7th 2011 I have already finished listening to half of it, and plan on finishing the other half before February 9th 2011 (it is a really long album). Concurrently with that, our label general Manager has ALREADY finished a complete listening of the album, at his home in New York City. Despite this relative quickness, you yourself have no hope of hearing this album for at least a few weeks before it is leaked by some cretin on a torrent site. But for now enjoy this blurry picture of it’s existence on my personal ipod
ANYWAYS feel free to download our new album “David Comes To Life” right HERE.
(update – lest anyone think [and by extension sue] I was actively trying to leak another band’s new album, I took the original link down. If you still want the original joke [that I leaked the new Cut Copy album for the 2nd album running {which is funny not only because it's another band's album rather than ours, but also because of the stark contrast offered by both bands musical style}] to have the same effect you can click right HERE to actually download the new Cut Copy album, which is a link to where I got it from [google]. You are all in luck though because the new link IS ACTUALLY OUR NEW RECORD.)
We are excited to announce that Damian Abraham of Fucked Up has his own TV show. That’s right, he’ll be appearing on Canada’s MuchMusic network every Wednesday night at 10 PM, as host of the relaunched Wedge. The Wedge is all original music programming, and Damian’s encyclopedic knowledge of underground music history (and indeed mainstream music history) is sure to make the show engrossing and entertaining in equal measures.
“The Wedge played a huge part in my musical development,” said Damian Abraham, host of revamped series The Wedge. “I’m honoured to be able to have the same impact on a new generation of music fans.”
Triumph of Life 7″
“It’s pretty much just a picture of a bird (the extinct Black Mamo) but then when you look closer you see that what makes the picture and the bird significant is the flower it’s standing on, whose petals are perfectly formed to fit this bird’s beak, and no other. This holds with the syncretic message that most FU songs are about, our ‘anti-dualism’ vibes.”
The Chemistry of Common Life LP
“If you look closely you can tell that its not just one image, but a composite of about 35 different shots lined up on top of each other, which is why you have some people and cars overlapping, and explains the relative brightness of the sun, and the lens flare everywhere. The shot is supposed to represent the main idea behind the record, which is the unity between culture and nature, and the idea that the literal source for all human culture and life is the sun. Even though the title is taken from a 19th century book on wild mushroom identification, what it means for the album is how everything that’s cultural about our lives has its source in nature and science, and that there really isn’t a divide between the two spheres.”
Baiting the Public 7″
“Probably my favourite sleeve that we’ve done. This was only our third 7″ release. The front image is meant to be a metaphor for what we thought we were in punk, and what punk was in the world (we were really into punk at that point) – a pack of rats running over a proper looking young woman in bed.”
“The inside was more to the heart of what this record was about, which was more or less a tribute to the Actionists, a radical art group in 1960s Austria. The inner picture depicts one of their ‘events’ which is basically a naked man aiming a naked woman at a roomful of people. The Actionists, along with the Situationists, who were another big ‘influence’ of ours at the time, were admired because of their blatant attempts to challenge and shock rather than pander to their audience.”
I’ve been asked to follow Nils’ awesome post that kicked off the “Matador Employees Write About Love” series yesterday. I thought I would start with the above Pitchfork TV clip from Vegas, cuz I fucking LOVED Battle Of The Bands at Matador 21.
OK. Well, love has actually been a big theme for me this year, so this should be easy right? Um.
I tell you, I love a Belle and Sebastian song called “I Love My Car”. It’s originally from the “I’m Waking Up To Us” EP, and you can own it as part of the unimpeachable Push Barman to Open Old Wounds collection.
Oh you know what I really love? I love my dog. The GOOOOOOOSE! I also love a painting of my dog that my friends Shana and Timcommissioned as a wedding gift. I just got it today:
I love Twitter. I’m at 99 followers RIGHT NOW. Just saying…
I love the internal debate happening to decide whether or not this is the appropriate forum to discuss how much I love my wife. Maybe set the website public now, Pants.
I love the Mannequin Men Hozac singles club single “Hobby Girl”. Both sides. And I love that Dave Martin was able to get me a copy even though I’m not in the club (thanks Dave and Hozac).
I love that I’ve spent an hour on this post and no one can yell at me about it (thanks Nils!).
I love rock ‘n roll. Put another dime in the jukebox, baby.
