Watching Fuck Buttons live raises so many questions, that you’re still scratching your head as the final synth note wavers and dissolves into the air. What do you want from a gig? Is the music enough, or should the live ‘show’ entertain? Can electronic instruments replace a live band? On and on and on, questions piling on top of each other, smothering. Some of them easy to answer, others irreconcilable.

Spending too much time thinking is at odds with just letting Fuck Buttons’ music overpower you, but surely the biggest criticism of tonight’s show is that we are thinking, that we haven’t been swept off our feet.

Fuck Buttons make urgent, pulsing electronic music that reaches its peak in its most primal moments, when Ben Power steps to his left and starts bashing the bejesus out of his solitary bass drum, or when he roars into his tiny plastic microphone to create a whirlwind of industrial distortion. In those moments of crescendo, Fuck Buttons look and sound the part, bending the rules and blending the genres to create something frighteningly forward-thinking and utterly gripping.

Ben and his cohort Andrew Hung are set up facing each other, synths and mixers atop a plain, functional table. Andrew has quite literally got a bag of tricks – some of his equipment sits in a propped-open, red-lined suitcase. Together they feed elements into the gradually building mix, and as the throbbing swathes become menacing, Ben and Andrew look like a pair of wild dogs circling each other, preparing to attack. A cap sticks out of the back pocket of Ben’s skinny jeans, and in a blur of bobbing movement, it could be a tail.

But how entertaining is it to watch people twist knobs and press keys? Of course it can work, but Fuck Buttons’ music takes a long time to get anywhere, and some of the riffs fail to change for bar after bar after bar, to the point that you can see the ending a mile off, and it doesn’t look particularly appealing. You can count the number of times that this music blindsides you on one hand, and Fuck Buttons push most of those moments towards the latter end of the set, leaving the first half to fend for itself. Plenty of people in here look entertained, yet the cheers that erupt when an incredibly basic drumbeat appears might suggest otherwise; or at least that they don’t ask for much.

Perhaps it’s wrong to ask for more; perhaps repetition is the whole point. But there’s not nearly enough excitement and diversity across this Fuck Buttons set to warrant high praise. When they’re good, they’re great; but there are long passages tonight that leave too much room for reflection and analysis – passages so lukewarm in temperament that we become conscious of our physical existence in this room, on this spot, where our feet are going numb. Truly fantastic music shouldn’t allow you the time.