Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing

(sample track: sweet love for planet earth)

(802/1000)

*incoherent screaming* / *scream* *scream* *scream*

Drone and noise can be challenging musical genres for impatient people. I can't tell you how many times my boss at work came by and turned off Angel's new dronetastic album (no it has nothing to do with the Buffy spinoff) that I was trying to listen to last Friday, protesting: "I'm sorry its just too much of the same thing". 

Its reasonable, I suppose; not everyone appreciates how a single guitar chord will decay over the span of one or two minutes when its fed through thousands of effects units. Even if they appreciate it once, will the appreciate it the second time? The third? The fifteenth? Drone purists arguing in favor of such tracks often end up rambling like Malcolm from Jurassic Park (woo Jeff Goldblum reference!), spouting how drone is chaos theory set to music, that the sequence of strums and decay exposes not only the irreproducibility of the drone itself, but of the behavior of the universe as well ... (*couch* pass that shit dude). Noise can be equally challenging: the fact that most people making noise music prefer to drop the word "music" from the genre is already telling you something, isn't it? Where's the melody in noise? Where's the rhythm in drone? Is this music or just crap?

Well for those of you that said "crap" (and I'm talking to you Dr. Wendy Gilbert), please give Street Horrrsing a chance. I hesitate to apply the terms noise or drone because really this album doesn't fit those genres in the traditional sense. Nonetheless, Street Horrrsing is an album characterized by drones and noise: huge electronic walls of sound are held up for several minutes for us to hear them swirl, breath, sigh, and die out before being put up again, and again, and again; distorted screams, screeching static and feedback soak every track in cantankerous cacophony. Drone and noise. No mutha-effing doubt. 

But beyond the noise there is melody; beneath the drone there is rhythm. Album opener "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" begins with a twinkling loop that sounds like its coming from a music box. The childlike melody dances playfully for over a minute before the first pulsing wave of drones sweeps across your headphones and into the mix, where it pulses and throbs about for the next 8 minutes. While loud and distorted, it is a drone which sits below the melody, never rising above it. "Street Love" is a remarkable song in which the listening experience is the sonic equivalent of watching the tides come in, in which it seems like nothing is changing only to find that suddenly the ocean has risen ten feet.

"Sweet Love for Planet Earth" blends into "Ribs Out", a track driven by tribal drumming and distorted screaming passed through a delay unit. Its noisy, screechy, but always moving. The next two tracks are heavy on the drone, light on the melody, and far more difficult to listen to than the earlier tracks. They continue to be palatable, though, due to an emphasis on lively rhythm, whether it comes from actual drumming itself (as on "Okay let's talk about magic") or by the pulsing of the drones themselves (as on "Race You To My Bedroom / Spirit Rise"). The penultimate "Bright Tomorrow" returns the album to the more listener-friendly form of "Sweet Love" before closing with the equally accessible "Coulors Move". 

While Street Horrrsing is definitely a solid set of tunes, the album is far from perfect. The vocals on the album always come as effects-soaked screaming, and while not always bad, they often border on being Linkin Park-esque. I also found the transitions from song to song uneffective. Its not a seamless blending of songs and instead sounds like someone just sliding a crossfader from one song to the other over the span of ten seconds. Lastly, my boss still has no qualms about coming over and turning off this album for being repetitive and annoying, so there still are some accesibility issues arising from the drone/noise. Still, Fuck Buttons has managed to produce what is easily one of the most rhythmic and melodic albums to hail from the generally inaccessible arena of drone/noise in some time.

Buy it from Insound.