Fuck Buttons, Street Horrrsing
Featured Album
Bristol duo melds ambience and aggression for drone debut.
F*** Buttons — aka Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, two experimental noiseniks from Bristol, England — might be a relatively unknown quantity right now, but they have connections in all the right places. Their debut album Street Horrrsing enlists the help of Mogwai's John Cummings (as producer) and Shellac's Bob Weston (for mastering) at Part Chimp vocalist Tim Cedar's studio. While radio DJs have had a hard time working out ways to introduce the obstinately-named duo, they've been quietly building support at low-key British festivals and at All Tomorrows Parties, whose label arm brings us this.
It's a beautiful experiment, at once aggressive and encompassing, confrontational yet strangely familiar. It sees tribal rhythms and rigid patterns share space with meandering digressions. Think the drone of Sunn O))) with the folktronic playfulness of Four Tet, or the Locust on a lazy Sunday afternoon dreaming skywards. Animalistic sounds and demonic howling make an appearance midway through first track “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” and reappear over the course of the album. At first they're unwelcome, but as the waves of feedback shift your perspective over repeat listens like longshore drift, they become as integral as more conventional vocals. Like the questionable urban sport the album's title refers to, this flies in the face of normalcy, but somehow it pulls it off.
