CONDUCT

Fuck

Matador records

A band's moniker is typically the product of long and arduous nights spent searching for the perfect summation of everything a band sets out to be. In the case of a band christened with the most illustrious of expletives, the connotations surrounding "Fuck" are particularly strong. Ask anyone to predict the band's style, and the answers will most likely be pretty similar. Death-metal. Angry punk-rock punctuated with chaotic background crashing and thrashing. Grating shrieks of hormone-infused, garage-ridden, guitar-laden pre-pubescents. Anything but the surprisingly slow, seductive and beautifully simple melodies contained within the San-Fransisco based band's latest CD,Conduct.

Fuck is a band that thrives upon subverting expectation and playing upon the ambiguities of language. A manifesto contained within one of their earlier albums explains that "From the puritanical knee-jerk cringe to the joyous declamation of tourettes [sic], the mere utterance of this monosyllable rarely fails to invoke an immediate response, emotionally and/or intellectually. And in considering an implied negativity, the effect becomes confused, comical and thought-enticing: fuck records, fuck product, fuck fans, fuck music."

Fuck's music is a perfect mirror of this message, approaching brilliance with its obvious attempts to evade strict interpretations and confining genre classifications. Fuck draws from diverse styles to create music incorporating Pavement-esque indie-pop, space-age bachelor pad swing, Uncle Tupelo style country twang and '60s Brit-pop, all united by the poetry and grace of lyrics normally found in only the most sensitive of folk ballads. Together, these disparate elements mesh together to create a hodgepodge of influences that somehow manages to persuade the listener that chaotic synthesis is the perfect synthesis.

The songs on Conductprogress through a series of anxieties that are never truly resolved. Fuck's fascination with the nature of fame is evident from the first song. The album opens with "the thing," a short piece that attempts to mock the expectations surrounding their name. A woman's voice, credited as the "sacrificial lamb," screams above low-rumbling bass and guitar while the band's lead singer, Tim Prodhumme, mumbles incoherently about "the thing." Yes, this is the Fuck we expected.

After 30 seconds, "the thing" moves into "drinking artist," in which Fuck quickly and gracefully throws off the weight of the connotation and begins the album again in a very different vein. A single guitar picks out a tranquil, wandering melody, allowing listeners a few seconds to absorb the shock of the transition before Prodhumme (sounding very much like The Flaming Lips on a particularly sober day) enters with an endearing, wavering voice to ask what it really means to be an artist: "You concentrate/get strait/calculate/what it takes to be an artist."

The first three songs center entirely around artistic themes: the boundaries of art, the line between good and bad taste and the difficult process towards fame. But where "drinking artist" introduces the anxiety of the artist, "straddle" carries that anxiety a little too far. "Straddle" is in the same languorous style as "drinking artist," with a slow snare gently accompanying the single guitar. Prodhumme enters with a more pronounced whine to exclaim that "it comes with it/much more than you know/beyond sarcasm/how much do you know?" A little anxious to be taken seriously? Definitely.

Even though Fuck often tries too hard to prove--with lyrics that are annoyingly bitter and whiny--that they are more than just a dirty word (after all, you made your own bed, Fuck), Fuck's music isn't always depressive. As the album progresses away from self-reflective artist anxiety, the music becomes a gigantic toybasket of styles. "Monkey-doll" is a Beatles-esque, upbeat true story of Fuck's tours with a stuffed monkey (rumour has it that Fuck never performs without a pile of stuffed animals covering the stage). "Italy" is a beautiful love ballad evoking images of the Coliseum and sky as Prodhumme--with a surprisingly sexy voice that moves effortlessly between innocence, vulnerability and purposeful passion--pushes the music to one of the few full climaxes of the album. "My melting snowman" is a short and eerie instrumental piece featuring slow, distorted carousel music, and "never comin' back" conjures up the freedom of dry Wyoming highways as Prodhumme belts about the open road with a slightly affected yet humorous western twang.

Ultimately, Fuck is at their best when they are sincere, and this sincerity arises primarily in the many slow, contemplative ballads on Conduct.The last song on the album, "blind beauty," is a lovely and fitting end to an album that strives to take itself seriously with a variety of incongruous textures, styles and ambiguous messages. In an arrangement Fuck seems to favor, a single guitar strums slow chords, accompanied only by a simple snare beat and an extremely sparse bass line. Prodhumme sings without affectation or stylized humor about the inability of anyone to truly know themself: "Talkin' to a blind beauty about beauty/Talkin' to the red brigade about the blue/talking to a fairy tale/Let's talk about something else/We don't know ourselves/Me and you."

In a peaceful acceptance of ambiguity, Fuck ends the album with an admission that they don't really know who they are. They are content, ultimately, to be stuck between styles with a name that has seemingly nothing to do with who they are. Listening to Fuck, one never feels the need for reconciliation. The lack of sense makes sense--disorder, after all, is sometimes a necessary relief. And what really is in a name? In the end, would Fuck by any other (rational) name really sound as sweet?