Street Horrrsing

When I'm talking about music that I really, really love I often talk about the marriage between beauty and filth. Between harmony and noise. My favorite band, Mogwai, does this very well. Find a nice light, sweet melody and then just put a bunch of feedback behind it.

Another band that I discovered very recently (that were actually touring as support for Mogwai) that does quite spectacularly is called Fuck Buttons.

Right off the bat they are drawing a line in the sand. You can't put that name in print, you can't mention it on the radio, you can't, in essence, ever elevate yourself past a certain point in popular culture with a name that has a "naughty" word. But they don't care. They are certainly not appealing in any way to the mainstream. I'm not even sure what radio stations would be playing this type of music.

Their first album "Street Horrrsing" was released last year and this fucker is quite the juggernaught of a debut. It's starts very innocently with a nice lilting melody, quietly plinking out on a keyboard, but within about 20 seconds is covered up by a heavy batch of feedback and white noise that nearly drowns all other sounds out.....and continues for almost the entirety of album.

There are small breaks within the album where the noise dissipates to hear a bit of percussion, but for a good 80% of the disc it is unrelenting and angry. Yet, behind all of this there is at its heart a quiet, happy and indeed beautiful piece tying it all together.


And then the vocals come in.

There are many artists who have used the vocoder as a substitute for vocals when they want to have it be distorted... somehow not quite human, somehow not exactly singing. But I have never heard a band scream into a vocoder throughout an entire album, obscuring any and all lyrics, or sense of the original voice.

I assume there are actually quite specific and personal lyrics to all of these songs, but the vocoder obliterates ANY semblance of clarity at all. We don't know what the words are, we only hear the emotion behind them. And this emotion is not happy.


This album has to be one of the greatest examples of 'beautiful noise' I have ever heard..... and it is fair to say that I have heard a lot of them.

If you are willing to listen to something truly different, truly blending the gorgeous with the incredibly caustic, check out Fuck Button's first album Street Horrrsing.