Noise, like anything else, needs practise, needs talent and needs inspiration. As odd as it sounds, bands like Wolf Eyes didn’t get where they are today by just standing round and making a racket. In fact it would be wise to pay little attention to their drunken idiot schtick. (Once I went to their chalet at All Tomorrow’s Parties to interview them but found them all sitting in a row wearing Manowar T-shirts, watching a Manowar DVD refusing to talk about anything other than Manowar.) Behind this facade is a group who know exactly what they are doing. This is backed up by the fact their live shows that year were certainly amazing compared to the relatively uninspired My Cat Is An Alien and the positively awful Magik Markers. (Yeah, yeah, alright, we know they’ve improved recently but still they were the only band ever to get booed off stage at ATP " a relatively impressive feat.)
But recently things have taken a much more interesting turn. Realising that it’s hard to compete with the ever burgeoning power electronic end of noise or the blissed out droners, certain groups have started backing tentatively toward . . . melody and started prodding it gingerly with a stick. Recent months has seen an album release by Health who use the standard rock format to subvert the genre by marshalling feedback loops to create dissonant but rigid tones that you would more likely associate with Throbbing Gristle or This Heat. And here we have Fuck Buttons, a duo from Bristol, who can see beauty in chaos " finding an exquisite point between irrational noise and rational melody.
Daniel Quinn from One More Grain said recently that he liked to write songs using new instruments because it kept the experience fresh and kept him in experiemental mode. "What does this do? What’s this for?" This seems to have applied doubly so for Fuck Buttons who have combined the most wide eyed, child-like and memorable of hooks with a scientific and calculating understanding of how to make the acoustic experience abrasive and transcendent. And if this isn’t the philosopher’s stone of making great ’pop’ music I don’t know what is. The ability to construct a simple melody using bizarre and alien sounds has always been the key.
Of course this isn’t really pop music in any readily understandable reading of the term. ’Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ opens with the a melody that synaesthetically looks like light refracted through drips of melt water as string-thin icicles snap from an ice cave roof and shatter against the floor before the buzzing and phased guitar suggests the entire scene being whited out by a gigantic avalanche. The vocals are 80% Norwegian black metal and 20% Gibby Haynes from ’Hairway To Steven’ and are by turns hilarious, unsettling and strangely beautiful. Elsewhere the cargo-cult drumming of ’Ribs Out’ suggests Liars or This Heat but it is the monolithic drone structures of ’Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic’ and ’Race You To My Bedroom’ which will have you either weeping for joy or diving for the off button.
File under experimental metal. No, file under noise. No, file under ambient. Actually don’t file this under anything. If you’re the sort of person who likes filing you won’t enjoy this awesome album.
