Since 2006, the singular Toronto rock 'n' roll institution Fucked Up have been releasing a series of long, sprawling, ambitious records named after years of the Chinese Zodiac calendar. Over the next year, they will finally complete that project, releasing the three final Zodiac records as an ongoing series that'll eventually make up a five-LP series called Grass Can Move Stones. The first of the three installments is called Year Of The Goat, and it was supposed to come out next week. Instead, it's up on Bandcamp today, presumably for Bandcamp Friday reasons.
There are two tracks on Year Of The Goat, and they're about a half-hour long each. We already posted "Long-Ago Gardens," the first of them, and we were seriously considering putting Year Of The Goat for next week's Album Of The Week even though it's not entirely clear whether it fits the definition of "album." Good thing we didn't do that! It's really cool, though.
There's a whole lot of lore to Year Of The Goat, which is apparently just one part of a vast multi-part narrative. Fucked Up singer Damian Abraham plays the Monkey, one of the two main characters, while more recent collaborator Tuka Mohammed is the Good Girl, the other lead. Year Of The Goat also has vocals from singer-songwriter Jennifer Castle, the Weather Station's Tamara Lindeman, and Integrity's Dwid Hellion.
If you want to dive deep into the record's story, you can read it here. You can also just let it wash over you, which is what I'm doing right now. The way that I tend to think about it is that Fucked Up have all these ideas, and what matters the most is that they put all kinds of thought into how they want to present this music. I don't necessarily have to get into the weeds with them; that passion can still come through when I'm getting lost in all the florid psychedelic churn that they've conjured as a vehicle for those ideas. Choose your own adventure, and hear it below.
"Year Of The Goat" is out now on Fucked Up's own Hidden World label, and you can pre-order the vinyl edition here.
