(Sacred Bones) http://www.konkurrent.nl
Now here’s something you can cut some rug to and no mistake Squire. Blanck Mass (aka Ben Power from Fuck Buttons) return with a new record that really should turn heads in this strange old year of 2015.
Power has always made widescreen music; music with drama, poise and a sense of place. The last Fuck Buttons LP was full of long, cinematic burnouts that made this reviewer think of Korzyński or David Holmes when he was making This Film’s Crap Let’s Slash the Seats. Somehow this feel is magnified a thousandfold on Dumb Flesh; to the point where you feel you are listening to a soundtrack of some long-lost Kubric cold war fantasy filmed round 1974. Things like No Lite and the brilliant Cruel Sport have got this musty, greasy, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy feel to them. Which is very, very moreish.
It’s a damned sexy record in fact; the beat on Atrophies sounds like an Old Boy’s whipping session in the steam room of a sauna (not that I’d know). And Loam is a bravura opening in the sense that it’s so cussed and antagonistic; a messed up, cut up legobox of slightly pervy sounds put through a mangle. It somehow morphs into the thumping and assertive cock lob of Dead Format (this is where you really here the spirit of Holmes kicking in, and you here again with the sultry Double Cross). And off we go. The slight haughtiness (or apartness) of Fuck Buttons isn’t really present. Rather, Dumb Flesh is sweaty and populist; the aural equivalent of some bloke wanting to grab your attention in a pub so he can tell his life story and get you to agree with the most salient points in his second hand non-arguments about football. Dumb Flesh keeps on pulling at your coat sleeve and demanding you fackin well listen, bro’.
Tremendous stuff; seedy, brave, direct and not afraid to want to be popular.