PopMatters: Fuck Buttons, SLOW FOCUS

Three and a half years playing the LARP of music criticism and I still haven't leveled up much, considering both the relative infrequency of my contribution to the field, and my frankly inexhaustive knowledge of music.  Maybe that's why I'm extra careful when applying numerical scores to new albums: as the one quantifiable measure of subjective appraisal, they exclusively invite perspiration when inspiration is the hard part.  Besides, thanks to review aggregators like Metacritic, these arbitrary  values mean much more than they really should, so I reserve superlatives often in resistance to the promiscuous praise some critics have no qualms giving out.  Call it balancing the field.  Hence, in my three-and-a-half years writing for PopMatters' new music section, only two albums have earned a 9 out of 10.  The first was the remaster of Bowie's Station to Station, and in retrospect, I'd say it really deserved a 10, considering the minor nature of its shortcomings and the major stature of the art.  The second is Fuck Buttons' Slow Focus, the greatness of which I have become unexpectedly convinced.  An excerpt:

For Slow Focus, Hung and Power have nuanced their approach, and the difference is tremendous. Where Tarot Sport alternated between mirth and agitated “palate cleansers,” in the words of Dusted Magazine’s Jennifer Kelly, Fuck Buttons’ third full-length is founded upon anxious slasher synths, ominous hip-hop breaks, and everything in-between, like a soundtrack co-written by John Carpenter and RZA is music buff heaven. In mood, meanwhile, Slow Focus explores a more robust and inventive iteration of Street Horssing‘s slow-burn menace, which was potent enough, but bound to tried-and-true tactics like tribal drumming and the aforementioned screaming. In both cases, Fuck Buttons rested perhaps too easily on blunt notions of the ugly and the sublime. Slow Focus represents a departure into more mature territory.  The result is an album that stands up to many, many listens, despite its basically repetitive nature.

Read the rest here.  Below, the video for lead single "The Red Wing":