Fuck Buttons - Slow Focus (ATP)

Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus (ATP)

The cover of ‘Slow Focus’, Fuck Buttons‘ third album, appears so dull and uninviting as to only invite trepidation as to what it may conceal within. I should have learnt my lesson with misleading covers by now, I suppose.

Because within the contents are otherworldly, embracing, and vast. The Bristolian duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power eschew the grimier aspects of Skrillex or – Hung favourite – Aphex Twin, favouring more a graceful, classy tower of building noise. It is simultaneously a car drive through a rainy London night and watching the sunset off a Welsh coastline cliff.

‘Stalker’ contains Tyler the Creator style-menace, whilst bringing together Giorgio Moroder and Air mid-panic attack. ‘Hidden XS’, through its Jean Michel-Jarre atmospherics, glories in a Sartrean positive emptiness – it acknowledges its own lack of existence in the mirror, and walks on. Existentialism by technonanimity.

The – presumably innocently – appositely-named ‘Prince’s Prize’ nears dubstep but won’t let you go all the way; ‘Sentients’ all metaphysical resonance, intense, foreboding; ‘Year Of The Dog’ loses nothing by reminiscing purple-period Pink Floyd with chattering aliens directing in the control room. Album highlight ‘The Red Wing’ combines the Wu-Tang Clan‘s feeling of filmic threat with Orbital’s more lacerating relentlessness, to create what feels like a masterpiece.

With barely a track under ten minutes, and not a vocal in earshot, Slow Focus maintains and embellishes Fuck Buttons’ integrity thoroughly, and with intent. London Olympics showcases and a headline slot on the Glastonbury Park Stage can’t hurt any more than their name under Dave Cameron’s new stand-your-ground-by-stealth internet nannying, and fear of having the perv-police break down your door – but Fuck Buttons comfortably raise a finger with grace and poise through a sublime electronic noise.

[Rating:4]

God is in the TV is an online music and culture fanzine founded in Cardiff by the editor Bill Cummings in 2003. GIITTV Bill has developed the site with the aid of a team of sub-editors and writers from across Britain, covering a wide range of music from unsigned and independent artists to major releases.