Ah, I still get misty eyed when I think back to something I’ve tagged as ‘Errors Fuck Buttons and Mogwai Tuesday’ last year. Sorry 2009, but no Tuesday night has come close since. Throbbing electro, screaming death metal vocals and epic, beautiful, kidney shaking post-rock all on one bill, as they played Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange last October. For a mid-week gig, it was pretty sublime, and the first time I’d seen Fuck Buttons live.
Last year’s album, Street Horrrsing was one of my 2008 favourites, and still regularly pops up as a loud, exhilarating, droney soundtrack for my walk to work. On a morning when you can’t quite wake up, it has sort of the same effect as sniffing a Vicks menthol inhaler on a really cold, frosty day.
After my very first listen to Tarot Sport, the upcoming album from the Bristol boys – Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power – it wasn’t quite hitting the same highs as their debut. That’s not to say it’s bad though. It just means Street Horrrsing will take some beating. A swelling fifty-minute roar of pretty bleeps, twinkling bells, shrieking monkey howls and battering tribal drums – sublime!
The more I play Tarot Sport though, the more hooked I’m getting. It’s the noise of euphoric, urgent electronica clashing slowly with rolling, distorted squall, that’s got me. And just when I thought the single and album opener, Surf Solar, couldn’t really be improved upon, I saw their video for it – penguins doing frantic laps of an ice-blue, aquarium rave.
Fuck Button’s set at Glasgow’s Stereo last Thursday blazed through the first and second albums, in one glowing, unbroken hour. Apart from a quick thank you at the end, the pair of them kept their heads down, standing opposite each other at a table piled high with fluorescent cables, and a suitcase full of pedals, keyboards and gadgets, including their well-played Fisher Price cassette player. Gripping the yellow mic in his teeth, while using his hands to play keyboard and, well, fuck with some buttons, Benjamin screamed vocals through it, while Andrew fiddled with a laptop and lunged and pogoed back and forth at the table. A lot of people find this kind of deep-in-concentration, on-stage behaviour annoying, as it’s not bringing much spectacle to the noise, but personally I think a couple of cheesy Glasgow-aimed gags would kill the mood of their primal, industrial mix dead, and I’m quite happy for them to let the crowd get carried away without interruption.
Playing with their love of a slow climax, where they take techno beats and hypnotic, doom-laden rhythms then bring them to a screaming, brutal crescendo. A bit more confrontational than Animal Collective, maybe if they’d hung out with Earth during the heroin years, and listened to a lot of Neu! and (the not yet invented) Andrew Weatherall together. (Weatherall produced Tarot Sport funnily enough.) Colourful, pulverising, beautiful and brutal. Maybe next year I’ll get misty eyed about Fuck Buttons Thursday.
Tarot Sport is released on ATP Recordings on 12th October.
Tags:
animal colectove, edinburgh, errors, fuck buttons, gig, glasgow, mogwai, neu!
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Lovely review