Retain to the Aggro

I’d never heard of F.U.C.T. before, and when I read they were labeled as crossover thrash I was disdained. It’s a style I’ve never gotten the grasp of, which has never interested me. So I was sure I’d be in for a hell of a hard time trying to look past the fact that I don’t particularly fancy the music, but trying to judge it for its qualities nonetheless. So as the opening track, which also happens to be the title track, gets things going my initial reaction is simply “what the fuck is this shit”. And I kept waiting for the weird and fucked-up intro to be over, and the album to actually start for real. But after a while I realized this wasn’t an intro, this is what they actually sound like.

What the bloody hell is this weird shit, I mean what the hell’s going on. Retain to the aggro has got to be one of the weirdest and most fucked-up albums I’ve ever come across. While I suppose there’s a sense of both thrash metal and hardcore (as was their original style back in the late 80ies/early nineties) this comeback album mixes such a wide variety of genres and styles it’s impossible to know what the hell’s really going on. I can’t even decide what style I’d say make the basis of their sound. Stoner, southern rock, psychedelic 70ies progressive rock, doom, hardcore, sludge... It pretty much has it all. And in the early stages of familiarizing myself with F.U.C.T. I was ready to just brush them off as way too melodic and sloppy. It really took me a while to get the hang of them, but after I had it was impossible not to find their drugged-out sound to be charming.

I think you have to be a stoner yourself to fully appreciate this album. The tempo’s mostly rather slow, going hand in hand with the sludge and doom parts of their music. Vocally it’s some weird-as-hell psychedelic clean howling; a southern sludge thingie. Riff-wise I don’t know, seeing as it mixes every style and genre I’ve previously mentioned, and the drumming even goes hardcorepunk during Grievances aside. So just what the hell is going on here? I’m none the wiser, but what I can tell you is I’m way too sober to get a grasp of it.

Originally written for http://www.mylastchapter.net