Fuck Buttons - Whelans (Upstairs) - Dublin

Fuck Buttons' wiki page describes them as a noise band. Noise bands usually bore me to tears but these guys really work for me. Sitting amidst the inhuman screaming, growling drones and pummelling bass they regularly have very pretty melodies bouncing around the place, not least on debut album Street Horrrsing's first track "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", which opened Friday's set in Whelan's and features constant bell-like arpeggios set against delayed synth sounds which over the course of nearly 10 minutes became more and more distorted before Ben Power sang into the mic of a crappy old Fisher Price tape recorder which was running through a distortion pedal to bring things to a near hellish peak. Those bells though, there's always some small shred of sanity to cling on to thanks to those bells.

And so it relentlessly went on for a 50 or so minutes , Power beating out tribal rhythms on a floor tom, Andy Hung bouncing around the place while his yelps, thanks to a delay pedal, stretched out to sound like a thousand spooked Chimps; the pair of them producing wave after wave of fuzzed up synth sounds distorted beyond any reasonable amount, something ... was done with a Gameboy (for the geeks, nothing the pair of them used was circuit bent). It was at times punishing but constantly enthralling.

I think I need to invest in ear plugs though.