Review: Ff - Ffeeling

On “Peggy Babcock”, I get my first pay off: a bloating bag of synthesiser bass, coated in psychedelic time-slur delay, waddling like a fat town mayor slowed by his lavish golden chains. Delicious. I’m abandoned shortly after, and Ffeeling starts to become irrational and manipulative: “Double Dip” drops a bomb of white noise amongst a curvy corridor of phased light pulses, while the disappearing wah bubbles “Stimulus Plan” feels like a fish tank illuminated by torches that turn on and off, off and on. Bloated seahorses vanish, only to be replaced by waving psychedelic flora. I proceed to be thrust between rooms unknown; the lights come on suddenly, and present me with the next irrational circumstance. This is what happens when clumsy, hyper-imaginative human hands start to meddle with the linear universe of synthesiser wiring – the walls curve with bass in excess, rave synths spills their bag of notes all over the floor, beats punch rhythmic emphasis into the wrong places.

“Grand Dejeuner” takes the situation into the ridiculous: gang chants, beats like slapped plastic, synthesisers in a bloody bullfight, orchestrated by a lead vocal that grins wildly into the anarchy. “Gold Plate Stanley” tries so hard to haul Ff together again, but the funky-heave-ho won’t hold in place, leaving cymbals and wah-guitars to splutter and break up over a canvas of sleigh bells. It’s an album of stops and starts; of violence and miscommunicative argument, forever dismantling what was never really intact in the first place. A very brutish and unwelcoming sort of electro-psychedelia, and one for those who like their transcendence to result in a broken nose and a headache of brash bewilderment.