Fuck Buttons

Fuck Buttons, Melbourne Festival Hub, Oct 25th 2013

Brilliant, just freaking brilliant but please don't ask me why! There were some vocals hideously treated by effects and yelled through a toddlers plastic tannoy at one point, and there was a token bit of bashing a floor tom but for the main part it was a show with all the rock'n'roll thrills of watching your nerdy nephews playing air hockey in a poorly lit garage.
The back projected shadows were cool though...how did they do that? And it was fun watching the little R2D2 robot spots doing their stuff.

Fuck Buttons..yesterday.

But somehow Id still rate the gig as brilliant : the bass was monstrous, felt in yr trousers and loins more than your ears and it was impossible not to get immersed and drowned in the rolling waves of noise, pulled in, down and apart by the undertow of tones, textures and vibrations, each song like an 8 minute long vertical black hole waterslide with no need to walk back up the steps (trunks chafing) before being sucked screaming into the next wormhole.... At one point scary vocal samples seemed to merge and match with the drumbeats, or did they? who knows? it may have been some devilish harmonic or one of the pieces of found/stolen/home assembled equipment on the operating table desperately reciting its prime directive as it was stressed to breaking point...

No Inxs Covers, no between song banter, no plugging the merch, no declarations of love for sweet planet Melbourne: just how it should be cos these boys are not born of soul and funk, they are the spawn of noise and punk, the legacy of Suicide not James Brown, Velvet Underground not Motown. There are drones not horns, breakbeats are distorted, everything here is twisted and bent: its dance but theres no way its disco. ..err its not Indie rock either though as a "fan" noted on the bands Facebook page after they played at Saturdays ATP fiasco:
"I saw you last night YOU WERE TOTAL SHIT, an insult to my eyes, ears and intelligence Fuck Buttons are FUCKED, you sucked!!! What a joke that you were on before the Breeders too!"

I used to have a drum machine with a button marked "space drum" , this button made an LED flash and inserted a couple of really loud "pooh-Pooh" synth drum beats into every bar and was pretty much unusable in any way since it drove you crazy before you got half way through the first verse....the "turn it fucking off" Button. 
Through the history of popular music use of the space drum has been attempted rarely and almost never mastered, Anita Wards' "Ring my bell " nailed it, and it doesn't get any better than Kelly Maries' "Feels like I'm in love"...and now in 2013 the Buttons wrestle it to the ground, strap it in-line with the warp drives and use it to power the epic "Red Wing" into the void.. my favourite FB tune  and the only song I recognised tonight which, though it was not exactly "note for note" faithful to the original, served the purpose of proving the whole lot wasn't improvised .

and all done by 10:15 too...