It’s been a while since the last review of a band with an egregiously rude name. Let’s put that right with The Fuck Buttons who played at Koko tonight. Attendance at a tetchy Trotskyite cabal obliged me to miss the support band.

Before getting down to business I think it’s time that music venues reconsidered how they deploy their door staff once a performance has started. My suggestion is that they wander round and pull out a selection of the annoying twerps who talk the whole way through the show. They can take them into a side room and give them a good thrashing which could be projected onto large video screens.

Goodness only knows what the Buttons’ handle refers to but in musical terms it leads you to expect a moany, bad tempered indie three piece. Wrong. Contemporary electronica is what they do. If the Futurists had tried to guess what early twenty first century music might sound like this is what they might have come up with. Imagine music made to sound like it’s being produced by a pneumatic drill, helicopter and food processor. They channel urban and industrial noise. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. A couple of times during the performance some ideas felt underdeveloped or half written but when it is successful it can be exhilarating and powerful.

Olympian, a track from last year’s album Tarot Sport was one of the finest pieces of music of 2009 and makes a superb soundtrack to any human activity involving movement, except, in my case, for dancing. But for train journeys, walking in cities, cycling with the MP3 player at a dangerously high volume it’s perfect. Tonight’s version had a disappointingly anaemic opening and only really took off a few minutes in when the “surge” began and the audience really engaged with the music.

The band is making the transition to larger venues and it’s not clear that they have thought through what this means in terms of stagecraft. For many in the crowd they would have been barely visible a lot of the time and you got the feeling that both the set and the performance were tailored for more intimate settings. In a smaller place with a shorter set this could have been a breathtaking performance. Tonight it hinted at a band with great potential.