Fuck Buttons:
Slow Focus:
ATP Recordings:
Out Now:
8/10
For all the right reasons, Fuck Buttons will be best remembered for their contribution to the 2012 London Olympics. The successful opening ceremony stepped up a gear when Olympians oozed out of the arena's sound-system, leaving many none-the-wiser and those that knew, grinning from ear-to-ear.
Slow Focus possesses more spiraling lengthy epics of a similar, though somewhat more robust, nature comprised of seven tracks over fifty unsettling minutes. Brainfreeze opens the album in brutal fashion, a hailstorm of faltering percussion, funereal drums and skirling synths that add up to the sum of the title's parts. Year Of The Dog does little to ease the beautiful pain. It starts innocently enough with a pulsating motif that transforms slowly into some sort of prom for the dead, before finally developing into the kind of cyclical dervish fit for a Philip Glass orgy.
FBs appear to have eschewed the softer rounded circles of previous album Tarot Sport and replaced them with angular shards of discord, a theme replicated on the single The Red Wing. By turns beautiful and bludgeoning, the cymbals crash, the bass-line groans like a foghorn and headphones across the land will soon be wondering when the trauma will end.
Answer: it won't. More dissonance continues with Sentients until light relief of sorts appears with Prince's Prize, a hybrid of Boards of Canada and hipster-funk that builds gradually into the album's glorious centre-piece Stalker. Boy oh boy, here we have ten minutes of eerie electronica and a comedown for the darkest of souls. Its construct is of sinister humming hooks, a sweeping almost symphonic middle portion finally nullified by a barrage of space and motion as the beats subside and final track Hidden XS pipes up to usher in another addictive concerto of chaos.
A truly unforgiving and out-there journey into sound, initial listens may disappoint earlier converts but, stick with it and you have a friend for life. And is it me but is that talisman on the sleeve just a wee bit sinister?
Slow Focus:
ATP Recordings:
Out Now:
8/10
Slow Focus possesses more spiraling lengthy epics of a similar, though somewhat more robust, nature comprised of seven tracks over fifty unsettling minutes. Brainfreeze opens the album in brutal fashion, a hailstorm of faltering percussion, funereal drums and skirling synths that add up to the sum of the title's parts. Year Of The Dog does little to ease the beautiful pain. It starts innocently enough with a pulsating motif that transforms slowly into some sort of prom for the dead, before finally developing into the kind of cyclical dervish fit for a Philip Glass orgy.
FBs appear to have eschewed the softer rounded circles of previous album Tarot Sport and replaced them with angular shards of discord, a theme replicated on the single The Red Wing. By turns beautiful and bludgeoning, the cymbals crash, the bass-line groans like a foghorn and headphones across the land will soon be wondering when the trauma will end.
Answer: it won't. More dissonance continues with Sentients until light relief of sorts appears with Prince's Prize, a hybrid of Boards of Canada and hipster-funk that builds gradually into the album's glorious centre-piece Stalker. Boy oh boy, here we have ten minutes of eerie electronica and a comedown for the darkest of souls. Its construct is of sinister humming hooks, a sweeping almost symphonic middle portion finally nullified by a barrage of space and motion as the beats subside and final track Hidden XS pipes up to usher in another addictive concerto of chaos.
A truly unforgiving and out-there journey into sound, initial listens may disappoint earlier converts but, stick with it and you have a friend for life. And is it me but is that talisman on the sleeve just a wee bit sinister?