Nelson Music Blog

06/10/2008

Posted by Music Blogger

Our French booker, Super Mon Amour!, organised a festival in Paris in June with many of their artists playing at different venues. Fuck Buttons were one of them. Clemence (one of the Super! women) told us "Guys, listen to them, you're gonna love them!". God was she right; ‘Street Horrrsing’ is one of the best albums of 2008.

The musical approach is really simple but at the same time really extreme: take a nice electronic tune and make it disappear in an avalanche of organic white noise. Said like that, it might sound quite rough, or even boring, but if you pay closer attention to their music you're going to start hearing many unsuspected things. Dive in to their slow burning tracks, feel haunted by their melodies, get suffocated by that voice shouting into a distorted microphone, but most important, you're going to feel like traveling. You don't really know where, you don't really know why but you're on that road and you're liking it. You’ll get obsessed by these songs! It even gets so strong that you can end up crashing at your place in the early morning after a long party and play the album to your friends. Not everyone will get the point of that loud white noise music waking your neighbors at 7 in the morning but you don't care. You, plus one or maybe two of your mates, will have managed to get a ticket and get on board!

As I was reading the above, I came to realise something. A lot of music today is about making songs using very clear influences, in terms of writing, of sound, of energy. For example, even though The Strokes wrote brilliant songs, it was all rather classic – guitars, bass, drums, a great voice, great riffs and melodies, simple drum patterns that push the right pleasure buttons. Because pushing the right buttons is what it comes down to. You listen to the music which pushes the right buttons for you, those pleasure zones you feel when you listen to The Beatles or The Strokes, or TV On The Radio. And here are two guys who have proved to me that there is more to it than just doing "the right thing" for a song. Who needs a clear beat, a chorus, a good guitar riff, awesome hi-fi sound, great microphones and social security? Fuck Buttons scream at us through a toy microphone to forget everything that's ever been learned, to concentrate only on what's instinctive, on life lasting more than 3 minutes 30 seconds on some cheap talk show or radio transmission. It’s noisy but simple, taking up all the space your ears can muster, at all times. And sometimes you think you hear a voice explaining it all to you through white noise, but it all just keeps going.

Fuck the buttons.

Nelson's debut album, 'Revolving Doors', is out now on Ctrl-alt-del Records.

www.myspace.com/nelsonrock