Experimental act pushes buttons

Music Review
F--k Buttons
Street Horrrsing
4 stars

I find it interesting how our pop-trained ears (and brains) crave melody to such a degree that when deprived of it, listening can become a challenging, even painful endeavor.
When familiar concepts of melody are manipulated or exploited - even altogether abandoned - we consider the music to be avant-garde, inaccessible, unmusical.
But only through challenges and explorations can our ideas be solidified, and the concept of melody truly defined with any degree even approaching adequacy.
The UK noise duo of Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power, better known as F--k Buttons, has, with its debut LP, Street Horrrsing, created a remarkably melodic effort - though it doesn't seem that way at first.
The album's opener, "Sweet Love For Planet Earth," begins with a slow crescendo of gently sprinkled keys eventually churning itself up into more voluminous, but still downtempo, waves of feedback.
But it's in the approaching and receding tones the feedback creates that melodic ideas begin to take shape.
Vocals don't enter the picture until five-and-a-half minutes in, and even then, it's a distorted wail - just another texture in the bubbling stew of sounds.
And F--k Buttons don't shy away from abrasive timbres at all.
The beauty is that they don't shy away from moments of gorgeous serenity, either, creating a sense of tension and release that keeps the listener entangled in the music, listening eagerly for the next passage of melodic comfort.
The opening seconds of the 10-minute "Okay, Let's Talk About Magic" provide a syncopated groove that becomes infectious with its repetition.
"Bright Tomorrow" (the closest to pop F--k Buttons get) drops the bottom out for an ecstatic bout of dance-pop rhythms and creeping synthesizer melody. It's a moment of respite and triumph as the listener enters the album's home stretch.
Street Horrrsing's sixth and final track, "Colours Move," lets a heavy drone climb into pounding rhythms that give way to upper-register melody (even harmony) before retreating back to the very same keyboard twinkles that opened the record.
In its completeness, the LP comes full circle, finding its way through scathing atonality and melodic comfort with equal aplomb, stringing us, the listeners, along and showing us the common ground between what we know as pop music and what we often dismiss as unmusical.
Here is an entirely musical effort. Its manipulations of melodic expectations provide challenges, but they're challenges that are ultimately satisfying when they wind up resolved.
We still crave melody, but our notions of what that concept entails have developed.
And that's the record's true reward.