Album Review: Fuck Buttons- Slow Focus

Perhaps choosing listening to the new Fuck Buttons record while mowing my lawn was a shitty idea.

Like, it’s not the first time I listened to it—I had done what I do with most records I review for this blog: I start by listening to it a bunch in my office at work to get a general feel for things, then I listen to it more carefully with headphones on.

So like sometimes I have chores to do, because our grass is not going to cut itself, as much as I would love it to. And our neighbors on either side both care entirely too much about their lawns, and so I look like an asshole if I don’t get out there within a day or two after they have chopped it down as short as it can go.

Fuck Buttons, by all accounts, should be confrontational and terrifying. And they were. Their debut full lengthy, Stree Horrrsing, begins with a song that made my wife ask if I was “listening to people being murdered” when I played it within earshot of her. The follow up, Tarot Sport, was still noisy, although exponentially less horrifying on the ears.

So now here we are, four years later, and after relative silence (save for their music being used in the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics) the duo known lovingly as Fuck Buttons has returned with their third effort, Slow Focus.

I became concerned before the first track, “Brainfreeze” had even ended, as I was shucking and jiving my way through my lawn, trimming a little off the top with our reel mower. “Brainfreeze” is good and all—like the beats are pretty dope. But it’s really long—eight minutes. And when the thought “I’m bored” crossed through my mind, it was like a red flag with this album.

Look usually I don’t want to be bored when listening to music. Like when I hear Norah Jones come on, I just fall asleep because that shit is so mundane. A group like Fuck Buttons and the word “boring” should be nowhere near each other.

As the album continued, I found I had to force myself to listen to it, and not pull up something else to play while I was finishing the lawn. And even now—right now—sitting in Caribou Coffee, planning out pieces to write and albums to review for THIS VERY BLOG, I thought “is there any other album I can write about because I really don’t want to deal with this Fuck Buttons album right now.”

Slow Focus has a much more polished sound overall in comparison to their other work. It sounds bigger—like on the first single “The Red Wing.” Again, anchored down by dope beats, the buzzsaw synth is just HUGE sounding rather than like ABRASIVE AS FUCK like it would have been five years earlier. And there are even some triumphant moments—towards the end, the ten-minute “Stalker” sounds like music that could be playing as a James Bond or Jason Bourne movie ends—even when the synths rain down heavy in the second half, it’s never ever oppressive or just “too much”—in other words, it actually has regard for the listener, which is something they previous lacked and/or didn’t give a shit about.

I saw Fuck Buttons perform live about four years ago, when they were touring in support of Tarot Sport. The day before their show in the Twin Cities, they played a small gig at Carleton College—one of the two liberal arts colleges in my town. Carleton, obviously, being the hippest of the pair. There’s a venue in the basement of one of the dorms—it’s a shit hole, but they tend to try and book bands you’ve maybe at least read about on Pitchfork.

With no opening act, Fuck Buttons went on around 9:30 I think, and played for 60 minutes straight—no stops at all. One song right into the next. And then, they just shut it down. The final song ends. There’s dead silence. And what had been destroying my ears for the last hour vanished, and was replaced by a terrible rushing sound of silence.  Their live presence consists of the two Buttons—Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power—huddled over a folding table with like eight keyboards, three drum machines, various pedals and gadgets, and soundboards with an endless amount of cables coming out of them. And while it was interesting to watch this happen in person—also, no laptops, which I was impressed by—and as exhilarating as it was at the time, being in the moment, I don’t think I have it in me to sit through it again today.

I don’t think Slow Focus is a bad record. But it’s also not that great, or groundbreaking, or attention grabbing. It simply exists as seven songs, put to tape by two individuals. Maybe as I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost my patience for stuff like this, and I have some kind of desperate need for my music to be interesting and to go somewhere, and to not just be like seven or ten minutes of dope beats and beeps and boops and bops and other sounds.  Or maybe that’s not the case at all, and I am just not in the right frame of mind to be listening to this right now. But that’s usually a bad sign for an album—that you can only put it on when you are in the mood for it, and if that mood hasn’t arrived yet, when will it?

Slow Focus is available on CD and LP on July 23rd, courtesy of ATP Recordings.