Fuck: Those Are Not My Bongos

One might expect a band called Fuck to showcase the talents of idealistically rebellious (and presumably intoxicated) 18-year-olds. (For that, you should perhaps look instead to The F-Ups, a punk band whose name somehow reaches the pure conceptual antithesis of the punk aesthetic.) One might also be surprised to hear that Fuck is no fly-by-night piss-off-the-parents outfit. Instead, the quartet is celebrating its tenth year in existence with the release of Those Are Not My Bongos, its seventh full-length CD. To balance one more surprise precariously atop the heap, those not familiar with Fuck may find the band’s music to be alarmingly, jaw-droppingly serene.

That’s not to say that Fuck is altogether above the antics its name would suggest. Bongos opens with dream-sequence harp strumming, and a voice asks, “Does the penis offend you?” before drifting into a simple piano-and-drums tune called “Motherfuckeroos”. This playfulness is apparent throughout the album, with songs titled along the lines of “Her Plastic Acupuncture Foot”, “Jazz Idiodyssey” and “Nowhen, or Now, Hen”. And the deceptively jovial “Firing Squad” sounds somewhat like a Magnetic Fields song, starting out with a martial snare drum and a Merritt-esque voice singing the Merrit-esque lyrics, “With tongue in cheek / That’s French for ‘diplomatic'”.

Fuck has often fallen victim to the “experimental” label in reviews of their albums. While their past work has certainly oscillated wildly from pole to pole, Those Are Not My Bongos is hardly experimental in any avant-garde sense. Instead, Fuck dabbles in a variety of styles through the album, seemingly more from an infatuation with the possibilities in music than a desire to avoid being pinned down. In this at least Fuck can be compared to the Magnetic Fields, but that’s about where that comparison peters out. There has always been a willful defiance of genres, limits, or sensibilities in the Fuck catalog, but here the band has settled into a slightly more consistent groove.

Bongos is the most cohesive album the band has yet released. And yet, the album still swerves maniacally over the musical highway. It sets out at a pedestrian clip with the two-part “Motherfuckeroos” and accelerates through “No Longer Whistler’s Dream Date” and “Firing Squad”. Then Fuck jumps into the walking bass line and hi-hat rides of the instrumental semi-freakout “Jazz Idiodyssey”, only to fade less-than-elegantly into the willowy acoustic “Her Plastic Acupuncture Foot”. By the time the album has plodded through “Vegas” and “Hulk Baby”, the listener will certainly have given up trying to predict where the album will go. The brilliance of Fuck is that it makes all this eccentricity enjoyable. Fuck believes in its game plan, and the listener really has no recourse but to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Which is exactly how Fuck wants you to be. If you spend a decade destroying any expectations of your work, then eventually you’ll be able to break free and ride unfettered over the wild horizon. That’s where Fuck has ended up with Those Are Not My Bongos. Of course, it’s not quite so dynamic as that description makes it sound. Imagine if you could ride unfettered over the wild horizon on some kind of bipolar donkey. Or camel. That’s sort of how Bongos feels, although it doesn’t exactly convey the pleasure of the journey, unless you really like camels. Fuck it, just listen to the album. You’ll get a kick out of it.