Fuck Buttons
Brighton Audio
There is a crackle of anticipation in the air before Fuck Buttons take the stage: the sense that the audience feel they’re about to see a band on the brink of great things. You couldn’t accuse the Bristol duo of relentlessly chasing success.
If you call yourselves Fuck Buttons, it’s pretty clear you’re not angling for a guest appearance on The X Factor – a state of affairs further underlined by their sound, which, on their debut album Street Horrrsing, offered that legendarily radio-friendly cocktail of distorted synthesisers, tribal drums and screaming.
And yet there’s a genuine sense of momentum building behind their forthcoming second album, Tarot Sport, on which producer Andy Weatherall seems to have removed some of its predecessors’ less palatable edges, without sacrificing any of the band’s visceral power. They play almost all of it tonight, and it sounds hugely impressive: vast, corrosive swathes of electronic sound, weirdly euphoric melodies and clattering rhythms, somewhere between dance music and an electronic take on Mogwai’s surging power.
Standing at opposite ends of a table laden with equipment and old children’s toys, Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power look utterly lost in the music they’re creating, their heads bobbing frantically, their eyes locked in contact, though it would be wrong to say there’s nothing in the way of performance: Power has developed an impressively baroque way of playing a drum, with much elaborate flinging of the arms skyward.