When Fuck Buttons first started out they described their music as “Rainbow Rock” - some seven years later does the tag still fit? Over the course of their short discography they’ve moved in a more holistically electronic direction, earning plaudits for the expansive synthesized vision of 2009’s Tarot Sport, and their mounting interest in techno etc has manifested in Benjamin Power’s Blanck Mass solo project; and yet Slow Focus suggests that they’ve not forgotten about the rock amid all them analogue rainbows. Quite the contrary in fact: the tracks are structured like rock songs, even those that jump off the ledge into bleepy abstraction, and the guitars and drums - whether engaged in a funereal battery or condensed into a pulsating motorik - are resoundingly rockist throughout. Nonetheless, Slow Focus is a hard album to predict: and for every all-hands-on-deck neo-kraut wig-out there’s a curious miniature like the souped-up Carpenter/Howarth tribute ‘Year Of The Dog’. The album concludes with two 10-minute epics - the Goblin-meets-Mogwai ascent of ‘Stalker’, and the titanic shoegaze 2-step of ‘Hidden X’ - that remind you of the duo’s Olympic-stadium-friendly power.
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When Fuck Buttons first started out they described their music as “Rainbow Rock” - some seven years later does the tag still fit? Over the course of their short discography they’ve moved in a more holistically electronic direction, earning plaudits for the expansive synthesized vision of 2009’s Tarot Sport, and their mounting interest in techno etc has manifested in Benjamin Power’s Blanck Mass solo project; and yet Slow Focus suggests that they’ve not forgotten about the rock amid all them analogue rainbows. Quite the contrary in fact: the tracks are structured like rock songs, even those that jump off the ledge into bleepy abstraction, and the guitars and drums - whether engaged in a funereal battery or condensed into a pulsating motorik - are resoundingly rockist throughout. Nonetheless, Slow Focus is a hard album to predict: and for every all-hands-on-deck neo-kraut wig-out there’s a curious miniature like the souped-up Carpenter/Howarth tribute ‘Year Of The Dog’. The album concludes with two 10-minute epics - the Goblin-meets-Mogwai ascent of ‘Stalker’, and the titanic shoegaze 2-step of ‘Hidden X’ - that remind you of the duo’s Olympic-stadium-friendly power.
When Fuck Buttons first started out they described their music as “Rainbow Rock” - some seven years later does the tag still fit? Over the course of their short discography they’ve moved in a more holistically electronic direction, earning plaudits for the expansive synthesized vision of 2009’s Tarot Sport, and their mounting interest in techno etc has manifested in Benjamin Power’s Blanck Mass solo project; and yet Slow Focus suggests that they’ve not forgotten about the rock amid all them analogue rainbows. Quite the contrary in fact: the tracks are structured like rock songs, even those that jump off the ledge into bleepy abstraction, and the guitars and drums - whether engaged in a funereal battery or condensed into a pulsating motorik - are resoundingly rockist throughout. Nonetheless, Slow Focus is a hard album to predict: and for every all-hands-on-deck neo-kraut wig-out there’s a curious miniature like the souped-up Carpenter/Howarth tribute ‘Year Of The Dog’. The album concludes with two 10-minute epics - the Goblin-meets-Mogwai ascent of ‘Stalker’, and the titanic shoegaze 2-step of ‘Hidden X’ - that remind you of the duo’s Olympic-stadium-friendly power.