The NBC TV anchor who genuinely believed Queen Elizabeth II had parachuted into the stadium from a helicopter might have begged to differ, but perhaps the most surprising aspect of last year's Olympic Games opening ceremony was the appearance of Fuck Buttons. It wasn't just the fact that the Bristol electronic duo were in evidence at all. It was the sheer amount of Fuck Buttons' music over the course of the evening that seemed striking. There was more of them than of the "rap music" that so upset Aiden Burley MP: if there was a "huge, disproportionate focus" on anything, it was on Fuck Buttons and side project Blanck Mass, who were chosen to soundtrack everything from the parading of the flag to David Beckham handing over the torch to Steve Redgrave.
For all its undoubted brilliance, it's hard to imagine anyone who listened to Fuck Buttons' last album, 2009's Tarot Sport, and thought: this sounds like the kind of thing that might soundtrack a global television event featuring Kenneth Branagh. In fact, it was hard to imagine it playing in the background of anything. A "big ball of sound", as the duo's appropriately named Benjamin Power put it, born out of a love of Aphex Twin and Mogwai and made using a bizarre array of electronic equipment, including a Fisher Price kids' karaoke machine, it was immense and all-consuming, not so much requiring your full attention as snatching it without permission: you couldn't really do anything else while it played other than listen and gawp. Its default emotional setting was somewhere between the kind of breakdown that causes clubbers to throw their hands in the air and the kind of breakdown that ends with you being strapped to a gurney.
It's an impressive trick, and one the band repeat on Slow Focus. The album opens with a ferocious drumbeat that sounds like a particularly frenzied take on the introduction to XTC's Making Plans for Nigel. Like much of Tarot Sport, the ensuing eight minutes of Brainfreeze evoke a weird apocalyptic euphoria: not a million miles removed from the kind of thing Arcade Fire try to conjure, but somehow more troubling and unfamiliar, divorced from vocals and lyrics, traditional instrumentation and Arcade Fire's nostalgic hint of the revival meeting. Like the equally astonishing 12-minute closer, Hidden Xs, it demonstrates Fuck Buttons' abilities both to locate an improbable (and otherwise unmapped) musical area between the bug-eyed elation of a dancefloor anthem and the "holocaust" section of My Bloody Valentine's You Made Me Realise and to fixate on a single riff for protracted periods of time without ever boring you: endlessly shifting its texture and surroundings, somehow managing to continually ramp up the intensity of a track that seemed almost impossibly intense from the start.
Without wishing to suggest they're in any way trying to capitalise on their Olympic exposure – bands interested in snaring that all-important slot on the Radio 2 playlist don't tend to call themselves Fuck Buttons – Slow Focus seems slightly more commercial than its predecessor, although such things are obviously relative. If there's a curious kind of funk about the slouching, fractured rhythm of Stalker, it's still a stretch to imagine a DJ actually playing or people actually dancing to something this ominous. The Red Wing shuffles along on a hip-hop breakbeat, which furthermore appears to feature a syndrum of the kind that, depending on your age, immediately brings to mind either Kelly Marie's disco hit Feels Like I'm In Love or the theme music from Pigeon Street. Said breakbeat is swiftly buried beneath a thrilling mass of sound: grinding bass, under electronic noises that variously recall whistling, the clanking of bottles and horror-film strings distorted almost beyond recognition.
Less successful are their attempts to dial down the visceral intensity a touch. You can't blame them for trying something different, but the faintly proggy synth chatter and slippery rhythms of Prince's Prize feel too knotty and contorted to impact. Year of the Dog isn't a bad track in itself, but its beatless arpeggios feel weirdly familiar: a lot of electronic producers in recent years have tried making music under the influence of Vangelis' Blade Runner soundtrack and Tangerine Dream's Love on a Real Train. It doesn't feel unique: not an accusation you could level at the rest of Slow Focus, where once again, the only real response is to listen and gawp.
