Vast Oceans of Feedback...

Album: Street Horrrsing
Artist: Fuck Buttons
Genre: Electronica/Glitch/Drone
Year: 2008
Label: ATP

Sometimes I get albums for simple or stupid reasons. I acquired the album Street Horrrsing by Fuck Buttons partly because of the fact that they’re opening for Mogwai in a few weeks, but mostly because of their name. In retrospect, that’s a really dumb reason to get an album. After all, you can buy an album by Porn but that doesn’t guarantee you anything, Porn least of all. Fuck Buttons are actually quite good though. I went into this album with low expectations and got a fairly large reward.

A duo, Fuck Buttons hail from Bristol, UK, the Mecca of 90’s Trip-Hop but have absolutely nothing to do with the genre. Instead, they’re an electronica group that creates long stretches of droning noise. But droning noise with a purpose! There are drums machines in some sections (track 2 is entirely percussion) and melodic keyboards, all of it wrapped up in the walls of sound. It’s very meditative music, but you can’t zone out to it, as every once in a while there will be a spike of sound or a percussion storm to shake you out of your reverie. At only six tracks, the album appears short until you realize that at least three out the six tracks are over 9 minutes in length. Like I said, “Stretches” of music. The length of the tracks could be a detracting factor to some, but it actually works to the advantage of the music. These are very multi-layered pieces with wash after wash of sound rolling over you like a black tide. You need more then three minutes to build something as big as this. The music is so good you barely notice how long it takes for some tracks to reach their full height.

However, if you don’t like noise music you may want to steer clear of this, for there are some parts where the seas of sounds turn to storms. Actually, scratch that; this album is where Sunn O))) meets Aphex Twin and the two sire a child into the world of music. Born from beats and feedback this thing takes the best elements of its parents and creates something entirely awesome. Glitchy is a nice word to describe some of the passages here. Imagine a controlled ocean of static swirling around you, creating shapes and objects and then dissolving them bit by bit and you’ll have an idea of what this band sounds like. But it’s beautiful, epic and occasionally danceable even, I recommend it highly.