Fuck Buttons
by Jeff Klingman
Fuck Buttons
Tarot Sport
(ATP Recordings)
With a gleefully off-putting name like Fuck Buttons, no one should have been expecting a sharp lurch towards pop crossover. In detail, Tarot Sport, the UK duo's second record in two years, appears more unwieldy than the last; seven tracks of wordless, pulsing electronics, most hovering around the ten-minute mark, and strung together as a comprehensive ebb and flow, each bit bleeding into the next. In some key ways, though, the record feels safer than their first. The most compelling moments on last year's Street Horrrsing LP came when Andrew Hung and Benjamin Power opened their throats, adding deranged pterodactyl yelping to the undulating waves of radiation. It wasn't catchy, exactly, but it gave the music some warped humanity. Absent any vocals at all, Tarot Sport too often feels faceless. But more than a lack of personality, the music here suffers for a lack of any real chaotic danger. Listeners using this record as an entry point might be baffled by the duo's reputation as blistering noise sadists. With its slow builds and thudding metronome beats, it resembles nothing so much as an unusually tasteful rave soundtrack.
An increased focus on dance music is Tarot Sport's main stylistic development. Lead single "Surf Solar" provides a formidable club beat to grab hold of during its long, majestic synth swell. It comes as little surprise that the track's juxtaposition of sounds brings to mind remixes of the band's earlier work. They first worked with Primal Scream producer Andrew Weatherall when he was tasked with making one. When they manage to hit on a simple, catchy loop, as in album highlight "Lisbon Maru" padded run-times stretch them past immediacy. Even their specialty, blissed-out builds in epic-length drones like "Space Mountain" are too slow-moving to ever reach catharsis. The tones are occasionally quite pretty, but that gets tiresome too. In the end, Tarot Sport isn't jagged enough to work as noise, and not sculpted enough to work as pop.
