Fucked Up play unreleased material, announce return of Long Winter at Hillside

Fucked Up played unreleased material and announced the return of its Long Winter series at Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont. Photo: Tom Beedham

Fucked Up might have passed up a perfect opportunity to perform a rare (if not a three-years-in-the-making premiere) performance of “Solomon’s Song” with Colin Stetson at Hillside, but we’ll have to forgive them.

Having played a solo set on the Island Stage just hours before Fucked Up’s, the experimental saxophonist could have easily subbed in for Year of the Ox collaborator and Bitters member Aerin Fogel on the band’s 2010 Zodiac series b-side, but such is the stuff of the Guelph, Ont. festival’s highly regarded collaborative workshops – and not it’s regular concert presentations – anyway.

Instead, among some fistfuls of classics, Fucked Up used it’s half hour and change to test some (marginally shorter) new material it spent April and May holed up recording at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio recording studios in Chicago. There was the “It’s the privilege of mass delusion” chorused track that has been performed without a name since the band debuted it at the February edition of its Long Winter series at The Great Hall in Toronto, and also “Daddy” (finally named after premiered untitled at Exclaim!’s North by Northeast showcase at the Horseshoe Tavern June18 – watch video of the song’s NXNE premiere below), which frontman Damian Abraham dedicated to the band’s children.

The band with the f-word name further proved itself to be a family affair when it closed with “The Other Shoe” and Abraham’s older son, Holden, was invited onstage to contribute group vocals to the song’s chorus (even if nerves got the best of him in the end).

While the new songs have been given stage time before, it’s no surprise Fucked Up would try to familiarize their fans with them while still providing sets that churn out previous full length classics like “Black Albino Bones” (which Abraham dedicated to anyone in the crowd afflicted with the “horrible addiction” of vinyl collecting), “Son the Father,” and “Turn The Season,” as well as 2012 single “I Hate Summer” to keep the crowd participation up. Still, with the studio time behind them, it’s easy to surmise that it’s only a matter of time before Fucked Up’s new LP drops and it’s given precedence over offerings from David Comes To Life and The Chemistry of Common Life; 2006’s Hidden World was virtually unrepresented at Hillside.

Still, the band was all nostalgia in between songs: Abraham asked fans if anyone was present for the band’s performance at Guelph’s long-since defunct punk commune, The Punkalow, and the singer also related a story about a Holy Fuck fan mistakenly attending one of Fucked Up’s shows and subsequently purchasing an album.

At the end of the set, Abraham made sure fans received random articles of clothing that arrived onstage by way of the pit, and Hillside host Vish Khanna announced the band’s Long Winter series would return to Toronto in November.

Related:
Watch: Fucked Up play “Daddy” at NXNE
Hillside reviews: Colin Stetson at Guelph Lake Island Stage – July 28, 2013
Hillside reviews: Supersonic (Lee Ranaldo and The Dust, Colin Stetson, Richard Reed Parry, Sarah Neufeld +guests) at Guelph Lake Island Stage – July 28, 2013