Blanck Mass: Dumb Flesh review – ‘suggests a Nike ad directed by Leni Riefenstahl’

This second solo album by Fuck Buttons mainstay Benjamin John Power is grandiosely billed as “a comment on the flaws of the human form in its current evolutionary state”. The thrill of having the LSO perform his song Sundowner while the union flag was raised at the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony seems to have gone to Power’s head, as the totalitarian self-regard of these bombastic modular synth symphonies owes more to Queen’s One Vision than it does to Kraftwerk’s Man Machine. Titles such as Atrophies and Loam pay lip-service to human frailty within a musical framework that suggests a Nike ad directed by Leni Riefenstahl.