It’s hot as hell in here. It’s sweaty. It’s dark. It’s cramped. The perfect environment, then, for an hour of electro-psychedelic skullfuckery courtesy of Bristol’s Fuck Buttons, and their suitcase of the sublime (in the true, original sense of the word), chock-full of blinking gadgets and twisted toys.
Despite a not-insignificant crowd mostly buzzing with anticipation prior to the Buttons’ taking to the stage, the set takes a slow start, in terms of crowd reaction, an irksome amount of chit-chat occurring throughout the first ten minutes or so, the set being more or less one continuous mix of tracks from both their albums, with only a couple of pauses between songs. It leads one to suspect that there is that element of the ‘trendy’ attender, more interested in going to say they have gone than to experience the gig itself. Having said that, even this writer feels some sense of restlessness; whether it was the result of the crowd mentality or not is unclear.
Any sense of restlessness or lack of attentiveness disappears from the crowd, almost without exception, by the twenty-minute mark, and little wonder. Instead, the crowd is being consumed by a droning, trouser-flapping experience that has the same effect the best dance music creates: an ecstatic trance-like state, in which only the music and an array of shifting shapes and lights (the visuals being absent of any real meaning, other than an enhancement of the sonic-dance bubble) exist. Okay, you can’t dance to it as such, but it is wholly immersive.
This is rave music for the usually reserved, beard-stroking post-rock crowd, with the potential to crossover into other audiences. They will never set the charts on fire – indeed, they will likely remain restricted to the more obscure areas of radio airplay, thanks to the name – but the potential to expand upon an already established reputation is huge, and on the evidence of this performance, their audience can only get larger and more rabid in devotion.
Our Verdict:
Andrew Hill is a freelance music journalist and guitarist for Edinburgh band Sellotape. 
Stereo is in Glasgow, not Edinburgh
That’s very true… I know, cause I was there (and have been several times. Must be an editorial oversight. Having said that, there is a Stereo in Edinburgh (or there used to be anyway, not somewhere I have ever frequented).
Fixed. Though, for the record, Stereo on Grassmarket in Edinburgh is still open. I hear it’s a bit of a dive though.