Holy Buttons

By Lizz Kannenberg in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 10, 2008 7:22PM

Ah, Fuck Buttons…how we love your mom-retardant moniker and sweeping, electronic moments of shoegazy wonder and hard-to-decipher sonic inferences. The 7-song Street Horrrsing, (ATP) released last fall as a 7" and just recently in CD and digital format, is a challenging listen with rewards for those who stick it out.

Driving synths and keyboards play nice with canned drums and often-indecipherable screams, all of which sounds like it should be positively grating but somehow gels to produce a minimalist version of the freak-noise bedrock laid by My Bloody Valentine and the fuzzy nerd rock of Yo La Tengo. Recreating the landscape of songs like “Bright Tomorrow” and “Sweet Love For Planet Earth” on stage (while keeping it engaging and refreshing) is no easy task, but Brits Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung have managed to arouse the kind of emotional response in hard-nosed (and hard-eared) critics coast to coast and across the pond alike.

A raucous couple of sets at this year’s SXSW Music Conference solidified that the band can live up to its asterisk-inducing name, generating the kind of riotous aural confusion that you either get, or just tell all your friends that you get.

Fuck Buttons play two shows tomorrow night at the Empty Bottle with Caribou, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., $12, 21+

Photo from the band's Myspace page