Album review: Buttonmoon – In Orbit

Buttonmoon bill their self-released début In Orbit as “a post-industrial psychedelic odyssey”, which was good enough news for me – I’ve had a tough couple of days, and an odyssey of some kind strikes me as just the tonic. So now I strap myself in to take a trip with them, as the opening fifteen minute epic “Final Approach” starts things off with sonorous whale-song moans, like a lone Gregorian monk singing to himself while exploring the Marianas trench.

Then came some squelchy analogue synth burbles, smatters of distant percussive sounds, cold and shimmering synth drones and pads… and later still we get wailing guitars from miles away, subsonic thumps and radar pulses and ragged subterranean chainsaws, muffled roars and screams and shrieks, garbled and whispered and bit-mangled vocal mantras and found—sound snatches, flutes and strings and artificial brass, and some fragmentary drums and beat loops, all collaged together into some post-apocalyptic parallax picture-frame, like riding a slow train with broken windows down the coastal line to Sodom and Gomorrah… if you’ve seen the movie of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you’ll know the fin-de-siecle vibe I’m talking about here. It’s hugely atmospheric, but almost airless at the same time, claustrophobic and agoraphobic at once, like the sounds that might haunt your brainmeat in the last few minutes as you swiftly froze to death in deep space after being tossed out of an airlock with a head full of ketamine…

Dissecting In Orbit song by song is pointless, in the same way that dissecting art-house cinema by describing each scene in order is pointless – you’re categorising something that is actively corroded and lessened by attempts at taxonomy, examining fine detail where you should be wallowing expansively around in the bigger picture. There’s just over an hour of bleak and moody post-modern soundscaping here, and you’ll know within the first three minutes whether you’re going to want to stick around for the whole thing – and if you want to skip to the enrgetic high-point, then the sub-Melvins sludge-meets-free-jazz chaos of “Mosura Tai Gojira” is the only track you need listen to. Buttonmoon may pin themselves down as post-industrial psychedelia, but they’d be just as well described by the phrases “dark ambient”, “horror soundtrack” or “scary incidental music for high-tension first-person-shooter video-games”; for an even lazier comparison, you could just say “rather like Lustmord”. It’s good stuff – just the sort of sounds I like to have on while I’m working, in fact, because the lack of vocals, rhythm or clear melody make it less distracting – but if you like your music to come in bite-sized chunks with verses, choruses, solos and all that sort of stuff, finding yourself In Orbit will be a distinctly unexciting experience for you. Which is your loss, frankly.