OK, cards on the table – Fuck Buttons are not a rock band. Street Horrrsing is not a rock album.
Now we have that out of the way, we can get to the important bit – Street Horrrsing is absolutely amazing.
You can’t go five minutes without hearing a band being described as “genre-defying”, but Fuck Buttons have to be the first band I’ve encountered this year who really cannot be defined using the traditional terms of music criticism.
The only tag that fits Street Horrrsing easily is ‘experimental’, and that’s so vague as to be practically useless. It’s the work of two guys with a bunch of synths and samples, and I’ll just have to try to describe it.
Street Horsssing opens up with “Sweet Love For Planet Earth”, initially sounding as New-Age as that title suggests, with a shifting wave of blurred and plinking windchime keys. Then a fat and savage sawtooth synth patch strolls lazily up to stage centre and starts a drone that sounds like the alien destructor beams levelling your nearest public utility building.
Then comes this wall-shaking wubwubwubwub bassline, with a huge slow vibrato like someone is flapping their hands over your ears. And then there’s someone howling from the centre of this noise vortex like a crack-addled schizophrenic with a megaphone fetish.
That’s just the first track.
Next up, “Ribs Out” sees Fuck Buttons getting a bit creative with the samples, creating a sweaty hallucinogenic ritual of chittering rainforest screeches and weird tribal polyrhythms, the latter seemingly played by pygmys using brittle human bones as drumsticks on an assortment of kitchen containers and other found percussion …
… which is followed by the return of the OMG-alien-death-klaxon-synth-rayssAAAARRRGHh, which seems to be the only reliable theme that runs through every track on Street Horrrsing. I could carry on, but I feel it’s pointless – if you’re still reading, you’re almost certainly going to love this stuff.
The noisy soundscapes of Fuck Buttons are beautiful and evil at once; Street Horrrsing is powerful enough to destroy entire cities, but delicate enough to massage your drug-fried brain on a fuzzy Sunday morning … though your neighbours may not be quite so relaxed by it.
It’s frightening, but compelling. You know that house in the neighbourhood where you grew up, the one with the untended garden where all the older kids said a witch lived or some guy killed himself or something? Remember how looking at that place made you feel – that combination of the urge to explore and sphincter-loosening fear?
That, my friend, is Street Horrrsing. That’s where Fuck Buttons live. Go knock on the door – I double-dare you.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: electronic, experimental, Fuck Buttons, noise, Street Horrrsing, weird
