Fuck Buttons, Sun Araw: Concert Review and Photos

Even though Tuesday is often a rather dead day for shows, BeatCrave was out on the scene at the all too familiar Troubadour in West Hollywood to catch an evening of pounding fuzz provided by the British group known as Fuck Buttons.

Everyone’s ears would need to tune up to get ready for the noise that would be blasting through the amps and Long Beach native Sun Araw was the perfect intro. The soft and mellow layers of chorused guitars over looped tracks gave an underwater feel to the sound.  You could tell with the swaying of bodies that everyone was getting into the mellow vibes.

Almost like laying in the ocean on a summer day, the lush sound took everyone in the audience into a dream-like world with every press of a new pedal and every strum of the 6 string. If floating on a cloud while doing the last of your heroine was a sound it would be called Sun Araw.

Even after the set many were still left in a daze but that wouldn’t last long. The second that Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power walked onto stage there was an immediate explosion of noise that woke the crowd up like an early morning alarm clock. It’s hard to simply explain what Fuck Buttons does on stage as there is a table full of pedals, synths, buttons and other contraptions that are all used to bring the sound waves to a climax. At one point, through the bursts of seizure inducing light, Hung even pulled out the classic old school Game Boy to bring in some 4 bit video game beats to the mix. Or maybe he was just playing some Pokemon.

Either way, through the multiple tracks that all touched the 10 minute mark, it all became too much for some of the concert goers. As the set winded down people slowly trickled out of the venue not being able to handle the complex sounds filling the venue, but we aren’t ones to leave before the house lights came up

Some people may say they are nothing more than a duo of knob turners, but after having our ears blown by the sonic pulses of noisy layers of sound, we know that nobody is better at turning knobs and fucking with a ton of buttons than Fuck Buttons.

Enjoy our pictures from the evening below!

Photography by Carl Pocket