The choice to open the album with the track Brain Freeze is a clear indication that Fuck Buttons’ success has not driven them to pander to a wider audience. This dense eight minute, 35 seconds of music is like being blasted in the ear with a high-pressure hose while in the distance you can hear a parrot being raped by a whale.
The Red Wing is a highlight with its ridiculously deep and uplifting organ which drives the listener’s thoughts upwards then forwards with a fuzzy inexorability reminiscent to Bjork’s incredible hijacking of popular music, 1995’s Army Of Me.
It would appear after the mainstream notoriety that Surf Solar acquired, the opening song to their album previous to this Tarot Sport (2009), through its use at the London Olympics’ opening ceremony, that Fuck Buttons have made a conscious decision to stay away from that 1990’s glitch-techno sound pioneered by acts like Aphex Twin and Leftfield.
Getting back to the opening remark of this review, it is as if Fuck Buttons’ members – Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power – have decided to break new ground in electronic music rather than pay homage to techno innovators. Unlike Tarot Sport, that was produced by famous British DJ Andrew Weatherall, Slow Focus was self-produced.
The track that best encapsulates this push forward into future sounds is the menacing Stalker. Again, if you immerse yourself in the track, the mood and images elicited by the title are made chillingly real.
The final song on the album Hidden Xs is somewhat of an atmospheric piece of music that from six minutes delivers the listener happily home from the grimness of previous tracks.
Four years in the making, Slow Focus is an album that is exactly that, an abstraction that if listened to from start to finish becomes something tangible in the mind of the beholder.
BY DENVER MAXX
Best Track: Stalker
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: APHEX TWIN, LEFTFIELD, LIARS, PANTHA DU PRINCE
In A Word: Complex
