Fuck Buttons @ Foxtel Festival Hub, 25/10/2013

...Or, "Why I'm going to be a bit more proactive in buying tickets next time one of my favourite bands is touring". So Fuck Buttons get announced as part of the stellar lineup for ATP's Release the Bats festival, cool. Then Melbourne Festival scores them for a headlining performance, even cooler. Despite the fact that I've been flogging the shit out of their awesome third album Slow Focus, financial reasons meant that I had to keep putting off buying a ticket to this - until it was too late. Damn, it's sold out, I'm not going. Timetable for Release the Bats gets released, oh fuck, there's realistically not much chance of seeing both them and Sleep (and Sleep were the ONE band I HAD TO SEE). So in the week leading up to the gig, I knew that I was going to try literally everything I could think of to try and get there, but the Facebook statuses and the constant eBay/Gumtree searches were all proving useless. In the end, I thought, "What the hell" and decided to rock up to the venue early anyway in the hope that there'd be tickets held on the door/box office, because hey, that happens sometimes, right? No harm in trying. It didn't happen in this case, but what did happen was just as cool - as I was asking the lady at the box office if any tickets were available, a gentleman behind me overheard my situation, and informed me that it didn't look like a mate of his was going to make the gig, and I could have that ticket if that was the case! So after a quick phone call to said mate, the ticket became mine! RESULT! Alright, so yeah, that was a long-winded introduction to this gig, but fuck, I was pretty stoked with how it all unfolded. TO THE GIG ITSELF! Absolutely awesome performance from the dudes - the purpose-built temporary venue for Melbourne Festival was a little unorthodox, but it worked pretty well really, especially for a performance like this. Must say that the lighting/projections/silhouettes set-up was great too, after all Andrew and Ben aren't the most entertaining live performers in and of themselves. But yeah, really solid gig, except it felt like they could've squeezed just a few more songs in, what with their songs being a bit lengthier than average, and three albums under their belt. Also, I think they could've chosen a better song to finish with than Space Mountain, especially seeing as they fucked it up a bit. Hang on, it's starting to sound like I didn't enjoy the gig - BUT IT WAS AWESOME! Just thought I'd mention the very minor things that could've made it even BETTER. But yeah, I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to try getting into a sold-out gig, it never hurts to rock up early and see what happens!

Due to a technical difficulty (let's just leave it at that) I had while tracking this, you may notice that the first three tracks are noticeably louder than those that follow. But I couldn't be bothered re-editing the thing, so it is how it is. Take it or leave it. On that note, the quality of this one certainly isn't amazing, and if you've downloaded any recent recordings from me, you'll have noticed that a lot of them have dipped. I've been down a channel for most of this year, basically, which sucks :(

SETLIST:
Brainfreeze
Surf Solar
Colours Move
Olympians
Sentients
The Red Wing
Hidden XS
----Encore----
Space Mountain

DOWNLOAD MP3 HERE