Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

It’s all about layers. Adding or stripping away layers of techno, shoe gaze, ambient, weird electronica and dance. This is what Fuck Buttons do on Tarot Sport. Creating a gyrating structure out of a stratum of sound. This is an album for the music connoisseur who gets dance thrills from Orbital but also likes the monumental brooding beauty of Mogwai. For Tarot Sport is built in a way where almost every track grows through singular minimal progression, leading to its final climax. The title of Fuck Buttons couldn’t be more accurate, as this is the creation of people slowly and making love with their studio trickery until they bring it to sonic clitoral orgasm.

For their second album, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power have enlisted Lord Sabre himself - Andrew Weatherall, on production duties and it is a musical coupling that works well. Opening track Surf Solar sets the scene. It’s the twisted yet beautiful sound of Jean Michel Jarre in a loony bin, off his head on drugs. A deep bassy beat pummels his brain, whilst nervous twitching electronic samples jerk and jitter all over the place. It may be ten minutes long, but it needs that ten minutes to gradually evolve and change. It works so much better than the edit version (See below). This is important, because in any good session of copulation, length is fundamental. And so it is on Tarot Sport; five of the seven tracks present are over eight minutes long. Just the giant lolloping beats of Rough Steez and the manic mix of crashes, squelches, buzzes and fizzes on Phantom Limb clock in under five minutes. Only The Lisbon Maru feels over extended, clocking in at just over nine minutes it seems like a marathon. And talking of marathons, the next long distance piece is called Olympians. It starts as a shimmering haze of bubbling electronica before beats grow out of nothing. It’s the sound of a dark room, filled with blissed up trance heads slowly sliding off their chairs. Closing track Flight Of The Feathered Serpent is another stand out track, evoking the spirit of Orbital with swathes of searing electronic noise over the top, it prolongs the beats and pumping rhythms on a plateau of unadulterated joy not unlike the extended version of Born Slippy by Underworld. This is proper reach to the sky stuff for those who think trance means something very different from Ferry Corsten or Robert Miles.

If you believe the word fuck is a vulgar thing, then Fuck Buttons have created an album of self disciplined wonder that will make you reconsider. You could get lost in this stuff. Try it.