Fuck Buttons
Street Horrrsing
ATP/ Remote Control


"Pretty" electronics, a peppering of "noise" and rhythmic build-ups, and some distorted vocal gibberish = Fuck Buttons' 'Street Horrrsing'. It's 50-minutes of the same method of construction and the same tones - six pieces wherein the record's boredom-inducement-factor is relative to its playback time.

Fuck Buttons fails where other groups such as Boredoms and Black Dice have succeeded. If 'Vision Creation Newsun' and 'Beaches And Canyons' are the landmark originals, 'Street Horrrsing' is the cheap knock-off, down to the uninspired album artwork. The duo's attempt to synthesise intensely human noise portraitures with otherworldly melody and tone-generation sees the end result come off like a bad hair day for Yellow Swans, and that's saying something.

People are calling the Bristol duo "noise" when it is in fact barely a step away from bedroom chip-tune noodling. If you thought a nerd with a rewired Game Boy playing Stairway To Heaven through a PA for half an hour was torture then 'Street Horrrsing' is gonna have you reaching for the remote quicker than you can say "Zelda!". Kinda sad really, when to the north in Leeds there has been vital noise-making going under the radar for the last three decades, with the extensive works of Matthew Bower eating guys like Fuck Buttons for breakfast.

It appears a lot of folks are heralding 'Street Horrrsing' as one of the year's best releases. In my opinion it's in a league of its own. Don't believe the hype. This one's a dud. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that there are hundreds of other albums that do what 'Street Horrrsing' can't, and that's keep your attention, immerse and transport you, and not make you want to vomit. Perhaps it's time to christen a new genre, "pretender noise".

Lenin Simos