Fuck Buttons, Street Horrrsing

Noise music is a genre rooted in experimentation. Songs that fly past conventional lengths, guitars played in strange tunings just to see what sounds they yield, volume levels turned up just to see how loud they can go — you get the picture. But all of these ideas come within a frame. Typically, it seems that guitar-driven post-punk takes on this role, providing a template for bands with noise leanings to work in, from elders Sonic Youth to new kids on the block HEALTH.

This trend is changing, though, and slowly the guitar is taking a backseat to the synthesizer as chief noise and effects maker, as more and more acts are opting to press keys and turn knobs rather than pick strings and strum chords. Entering their ranks is British duo Fuck Buttons, two electro-minded musicians given wholly over to the synthesizer who have combined the visceral elements of noise music with the droning-fixation tendencies of electronica. The resulting creation is Street Horrrsing, a spacious, arctic debut album that sounds near effortless at times.

Each track on the album has plenty of room to breathe, never becoming too crowded or too complex but featuring subtle changes in key and tone, achieving a sort of mesmerizing effect. Opener “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” sprawls over the nine-minute mark, building suspense with thundering synths and alleviating it with airier ones. Following this is “Ribs Out,” an aptly titled bare-bones song that uses only a hypnotic tribal drum beat and delayed vocal screeches.

Obscured vocals are used on every track on Street Horrrsing, to varied degrees of success. On most of the album’s tracks, they’re simply another sound, never taking away from the songs but not always adding a whole lot, either. On tracks where they’re used as punctuation, however, as on “Ribs Out” and “Bright Tomorrow,” they complement each song and become integral to their development.

Integral to the album’s development is “Bright Tomorrow,” the beating heart at the center of Street Horrrsing, its bass beat pumping rhythm underneath stuttering, crashing synths and distant vocal squalls. “Bright Tomorrow” feels like the moment the album has been building toward, and it meets this expectation admirably. The album’s comedown, “Colours Move,” sees a return of the tribal drums and screeches of “Ribs Out,” pounding and echoing under grinding synths. The track serves as a summarization of the album, using most of its basic ideas but without sounding rehashed.

Music that wanders as much as Street Horrrsing‘s invites the mind to wander along with it. In doing this, it’s easy to imagine the album as the experiment of two friends attempting to satisfy their own musical curiosities more than to appeal to an audience. And their difficult-to-market-to-the-major labels name seems to further the idea that Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power are making music for themselves. That’s not to say, however, that Street Horrrsing can not be enjoyed by anyone else. Rather, the album is one of those that grows on its listener over time, each listen yielding new subtleties and nuances that make the album more and more rewarding.