Pitchfork 81

Benjamin John Power has always been typecast as one of the nice guys of noise. With Fuck Buttons, he’s played sun-worshipping primitivist, screamadelic raver, and something close to arena rocker on 2013’s Slow Focus. His solo project Blanck Mass maintains similar posi-vibes while working within mesmeric repetition and industrial dance. At the current moment, however, it may be hard to find much truth in “Okay, Let’s Talk About Magic” and “Sweet Love for Planet Earth” (both 2008 Fuck Buttons titles). The cover of Power’s latest Blanck Mass album seems to nod in agreement. At a time when global politics is just one man after another showing his ass, the only sensible reaction is to show your teeth.

World Eater finds one of electronic noise’s most popular and populist artists making his heel turn. Specifically, it happens after the oblong music box melody of opener “John Doe’s Carnival of Error” goes into double time, generating the promise of euphoric lift-off that typified Fuck Buttons’ 2009 Andy Weatherall-abetted album Tarot Sport. But it’s a classic supervillain trick of lulling its victims with a disturbing, playful calm before unleashing indiscriminate destruction. A nine-minute blitzkrieg like “Rhesus Negative” needs no nuance; the only operative principle here is loud. Brutal kick drums compete with twin-turret guitars for dominance in the mix before a return to the black metal shrieking last heard on 2008’s Street Horrrsing. While Power’s prior work offered the possibility of meditative headphone listening or even dancefloors, “Rhesus Negative” is awesome in the most literal sense, meant to paralyze with both admiration and fear.

But it doesn’t feel like an endurance test—instead, the brickwalled production of “Rhesus Negative” recalls industrial-arena monoliths like Nine Inch Nails’ “Wish” or Cold Cave’s “The Great Pan Is Dead.” Like anything under the Fuck Buttons or Blanck Mass names, World Eater is suitable for casual listeners who have some curiosity for extreme music and a decent pain threshold. The difference here is that Power looks back on the past decade of electronic music and finds how all of it is capable of showing the kind of domineering aggression that people might only otherwise get from Fuck Buttons, heavy metal, or Tunnel bangers.

World Eater evokes everything from his own up-with-people breakout single “Bright Tomorrow” to Purity Ring’s EDM-indie, from witch house to the trap music populating millions of SoundClouds and Vegas nightclubs. The undulating, pitched-down vocals and skittering drum patterns of “Please” bear the echo of Holy Other and any number of Tri Angle acts, though it sounds murderous rather than haunted. It’s a rare instance of World Eater showing menace and finesse rather than brute strength. Similarly, “The Rat” runs “Rock n’ Roll Pt. 2” through TNGHT’s blown subwoofers. “Silent Treatment” is Power going “POWER,” chopping a choir into a war cry and weaving it through a labyrinthian grid of footwork-inspired percussion.

Just about anything is going to be interpreted as an act of protest in 2017. On World Eater, the coexistence of melody and belligerence, of fragility under an invincible veneer, speak to the constructive and destructive capabilities of man. Power is completely honest about which instinct is winning right now. Nearly every reference on World Eater sounded utopian at one point, and had the album been released during a less turbulent time, “The Rat” could have feasibly been used for the London Summer Games alongside Fuck Buttons’ own “Olympians.” World Eater does not seem like a doomsday device by design, though. It might sound like one now, but Power leaves open the possibility of it being his darkest transmission before the dawn of a new bright tomorrow.

Tiny Mix Tapes 80

Blanck Mass
World Eater

[Sacred Bones; 2017]

Rating: 4/5

Drowned In Sound 70

The obvious overlap between both outfits is the wall of electronic noise. It’s an unmistakable sound. But while Fuck Buttons draw their strength from the slow build, Blanck Mass throws everything at you all at once. While Fuck Buttons take one motif and soar upwards, adding layer after layer into towering skyscrapers of noise, Blanck Mass tracks are a rush forwards, hurtling from one idea to the next. In this sense, it is the quintessential side project: the cathartic realisation of all ideas and impulses. You can almost picture the bulging notebook.

The massive advantage of this is that Blanck Mass has a capacity to surprise in a way Fuck Buttons never could. Abrupt endings, gear-shifts in texture, and unexpected vocal samples are just a few of the extra colours on Power’s palette in this mode. And while Fuck Buttons can only really hit one tone - admittedly a unique one, pitched somewhere between euphoria and menace - Blanck Mass feels freer to wander from the laid back trance influences of something like ‘Please’, through the expected passages of violence, and then back to the feel-good, spliced up vocal samples of closer ‘Hive Mind’.

The flipside is that it’s easier for Power to run a concept into the ground here. Fuck Buttons draw power from building upwards; Blanck Mass draws power from hurtling forwards and - as the cliche about the shark goes - when these tracks stop moving, they die. The best example of this is ‘The Rat’ which takes a clutch of simple melodic ideas, strings them into a sequence, and just rotates through them for six minutes or so. It sounds more like music for the menu screen for a shoot em up, than anything befitting World Eater’s aggressive title and artwork. Happily, though, these meandering misfires are few.

With the snarling beast on the cover, and a press pack which frames this record as a reaction to the existential frenzy of 2016, it’s surprising that World Eater contains some of Power’s most serene work to date. It is easy to imagine him creating a definitive document of aggression and panic. But by and large, this isn’t how he represents our current political, social and spiritual situation - he finds moments of calm, drift and uplift too, as he spins through his variety show of ideas which don’t quite fit for Fuck Buttons. Above anything else, it is probably this fragmented, disorientating rush from one thing to the next which reflects our times most accurately of all.

The Guardian 60

(Sacred Bones)

Fuck Buttons’s Ben Power certainly doesn’t appear to think that what the world needs now is love, sweet love. His third album as Blanck Mass, we learn, is intended to represent “a previous year teeming with anger, violence, confusion and frustration”, and as the nine minutes of Rhesus Negative unfold hyperkinetically, a treated voice somewhere very deep in the mix conveying some nameless dread, it does feel as if one is being smacked repeatedly around the head with an analogue synth, albeit in a good way. Thrilling though it is, it’s genuinely a relief that it’s followed by Please, which turns the treadmill back to walking pace and introduces more recognisably human elements (and is perhaps one of the expressions of love Power says the record contains – though you’d be ill-advised to go courting with it as your theme tune). World Eater is a brutal record, but there’s humanity in it, because Power is drawn to melodies: even at its most pummelling it offers sweet spots and moments of instant gratification. Even without those, its unrelenting nature gives it a hypnotic power.