Blanck Mass - Animated Violence Mild

The Quietus

Hubris is a terrible thing to have to admit to. Watching the world fall apart and literally burn in real time is a particularly disorientating experience but really, do we have anyone to blame but ourselves? Benjamin John Power doesn’t think so. “We throw ourselves out of our own garden,” he writes in the press release for Animated Violence Mild, his fourth record as Blanck Mass. “We poison ourselves to the edges of an endless sleep.”

It’s a bleak image for bleak times. Biblical parallels are frequently – if a little clumsily – deployed by Power here: the forbidden fruit, oozing blood on the cover; a coiled serpent eating its own tail; an inability to resist temptation. In Power’s eyes the snake is now consumerism, and we are complicit not only in its existence, but in allowing it to grow wild and untamed, devouring everything in its path. “We betray the better instincts of our nature and the future of our own world,” says Power of our self-inflicted downfall; we are reaping what we’ve sowed.

For someone immersed in industrial dance and monolithic blitzkriegs like ‘Rhesus Negative’ and ‘Cruel Sport’ though, Animated Violence Mild doesn’t sound particularly angry or violent. Get past the brutal seven-minute blast that is ‘Death Drop’ – which features the same, indecipherable screams that powered Fuck Buttons’ ‘Sweet Love For Planet Earth’ – and things become a little more nuanced. Euphoric even. ‘House Vs. House’ boasts a chorus melody that’s pure hands-in-the-air joy while ‘No Dice’ sounds like Power trying to make a glittering EDM/hip hop hybrid to conquer charts and daytime radio as easily as dark clubs.

‘Creature/West Fuqua’ goes even further, morphing into the sort of ambient harp interlude that Florence Welch has virtually trademarked. It’s a jolt of entirely out of step with his previous work – after the maximalist assault that is ‘Love Is A Parasite’, a serene pool of beauty is the last thing you expect. Then again, Power has always teased with just how far he was willing to push his sonic barrages, stopping short of running everything off the rails; what better way to rebel than making the lushest, sweetest music of his career?

In 2019, it’s hard to know just how much angrier we can get. There was plenty of belligerence and protest on 2017’s World Eater, an album that quite literally bared its teeth, and a track like ‘Wings Of Hate’ delivers exactly what you expect it to. But there’s exasperation and frustration here too, and it’s not quite the maximalist, terrifying work one might expect given the subject matter at hand. Personal grief also informed the year Power spent working on Animated Violence Mild, so following a more reflective, emotionally resonant path makes sense. After all, responding to the clusterfuck we’re living through with some self care and catharsis seems infinitely more productive than yet more screams of rage.

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The Guardian 80

(Sacred Bones)
Mourning the death of the planet and a parent, Ben Power has made an album that fuses existential fear with sheer beauty

Back in 2012, Blanck Mass sounded optimistic. Ben Power’s one-man electro-noise project (distinct from his work as part of the duo Fuck Buttons) was best known for his ambient headrush of a composition, Sundowner, which was used as part of the soundtrack for Danny Boyle’s buoyant Olympics opening ceremony. But, as the political mood of the country continued to sour, Power’s work darkened in response, leading up to 2017’s snarling World Eater, and now Animated Violence Mild: an album where blind rage and beauty commingle. In the accompanying press release, Power describes how the record was born of grief – he wrote it while musing on how consumerism is destroying our planet. In the final stages of recording, his father died, and so he also began processing this deeply personal loss alongside his global mourning.

The Guardian 80

(Sacred Bones)

With the unlikely Olympian duo Fuck Buttons having largely been on the back burner since 2013, Benjamin John Power has had plenty of time to concentrate on his side project, Blanck Mass. Not surprisingly, many of the highlights of his fourth solo album – a treatise on capitalism and loss – nod to Power’s better-known band. Death Drop drags distorted death metal screams on to the dancefloor and ends up coming across as an industrial evisceration of the Doctor Who theme music. Album highlight Love Is a Parasite, meanwhile, is the sort of overloaded Wagnerian techno maximalism that is Fuck Buttons’ calling card, its distorted beats driving a melange of house motifs, deeply buried R&B vocal lines, soaring orchestral strings and punishing sheets of noise.

But just as 2017’s World Eater showcased a newfound knack for melodic levity amid the Sturm und Drang, so Power reins in the cacophony here on the blissfully minimal Creature/West Fuqua. The hypnotic No Dice eases back on the intensity, aims for the hips rather than going for the throat, and consequently is rather more Massive Attack than massive attack.

Pitchfork 79

The Fuck Buttons member’s fourth solo album channels the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of his career.