Fuck Buttons – Kentish Town Forum, London 07/02/14

I challenge anyone to find a more euphoric act of aural violence than the bass kick of “Surf Solar”. It’s both disembodied and alive. It’s repetitive and abrasive. It’s punishingly loud. But as the chopped up melody bends around loops of live percussion and dense layers of drone – it’s also one of the most welcome acts of full sensory overload you’re likely to experience in concert.

Fuck Buttons certainly have a formula. But what really comes across from tonight’s set – one split pretty evenly across their three LPs – is how their formula can be used to paint textures of completely different moods and tones.

It’s easy to hear how the soaring euphoria of Tarot Sport material matched the uplift of our Olympic opening ceremony; shimmering riffs soaring above the mire of industrial noise below. But, although clearly working from the same blueprints, something like The Red Wing is much more of a vile, crawling, wintery thing; as poles apart as London 2012 and Sochi.

On record, working within fairly narrow tonal parameters each time, they’ve created three startlingly assured and fully realised LPs; bound by the singularity of their vision.

But tonight, the tones of these three LPs are juxtaposed in sharp relief, making for a truly vital set. The stability of their formula provides coherence, while the fluidity in tone offers emotional range. And as the visuals evolve alongside the textures, swelling into more and more abstracted, titanic versions of the duo’s silhouettes, the set becomes thrillingly intense in a multi-faceted way.

If there is room for criticism, especially in the live context, it could be said that the duo have an unwillingness to placate an audience who want to engage with the music more physically.

Each new layer of squalor – perfectly and carefully injected at the precise moment you feel the textures could tower no higher – hits a spot of visceral euphoria, causing a sea of hands rushing into the air in response. But here we meet the paradox at the heart of their music: for all its physicality, it’s ultimately introspective; more suited to the meditator than the dancer.

But this only a by-product of Fuck Buttons’ craft, and they’re right not deviate from their approach for the sake of crowd pleasing. Indeed, it’s great to hear Fuck Buttons put so much faith in some of their most drone-based, patience testing material tonight – opening with the barren, doom laden expanses of “Stalker”, and closing with the stalling, screaming echo chamber of “Sweet Love For Planet Earth”. And they’re right to have this faith in their more understated material.

Fuck Buttons’ power does not stem from immediacy. It stems from drawing the listener more and more deeply into their textures, immersing them in noise. Tonight – as ever – they achieve this with little effort, and maximum impact.