Slow Focus

Fuck Buttons’ third album – a synthesis of noise, hip-hop, drone and shoegaze – is basically avant-garde weightlifting music, forgoing heart and brains in hopes that brute force alone will elevate it to heaven. Occasionally, it does. Highlights “The Red Wing” and “Sentients” finish big but start with an underdog’s clumsiness, rising out of the mist like cartoon colossi (a callback to 2009’s funnier, airier Tarot Sport). Then come closers “Stalker” and “Hidden XS,” which flex for nearly twenty minutes without variation. (It turns out there is only so much awesome one can take.) Still, the duo brings more art to blockbusters than most of rap and Hollywood. Their last big show? The London Olympics.