The Beginning Has No End

So we played them on the podcast, and posted them with as tenuous a reason as possible, and now five days after it’s release I can confirm what I suspected - Fuck Buttons have made the best album of the year so far, and it’s going to take something pretty special to better it in 2008.

If you haven’t got Street Horrrsing yet, you could stop reading this now and get it from here - but bear in mind you can download it all without too many problems as it’s all over the place, and whilst you’re piecing it all together, you could read why everyone else thinks it so good, so I don’t have to bother to go into it all again.

And once you’re done buying or downloading and had a listen to it all the way through, come back here and download Lets See If Any Ghosts Are Here Yeah? and suss out where it all started. I don’t know how long it had been knocking about, but my increasingly patchy memory seems to suggest I picked it up as a home spun cd-r around this time last year. Or something like that. Give or take a couple of months. Probably.



Fuck Buttons – Lets See If Any Ghosts Are Here Yeah?


Although consisting of one track nearly 30 minutes long, it’s clearly the blueprint for Street Horrrsing – from the chiming start not quite reproduced as Sweet Love For Planet Earth, moving though what would become Ribs Out, the recurring sounds and motifs of power synths and distorted screams, and culminating in more or less exactly what would become Colours Move. Missing is the most impressive passage of the album, the section of Okay Let’s Talk About Magic through Race You To The Bedroom / Spirits Rise to Bright Tomorrow, which clearly demonstrates how far important progress has been made in a relatively short time.

Even then, it’s still interesting to see where things started out, and the influence that a record deal, Mogwai production and the needs of the music industry have had – from the splitting of the album across six tracks when it still holds together as one continuous piece, to the editing for a seven inch release which although handy and serving a purpose, seems to go against everything else the band puts together.

Despite the various luminaries appearing at the Camber ATP, Fuck Buttons are by far and away the turn I’m looking forward to seeing most, but for those that can’t bear the thought of chalet life for a weekend, they’re playing with Battles and Liars at the Astoria on the 14th of May, which surely could be splendid? If you’re in North America, they’re all over the place right now. Buy the album. Because you should. And this is a bit special as well.




Tiny Dancer


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