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.
