Review by Jordan Cronk: I’ve spent more time in the last couple of weeks wrestling with the relative merits of Tarot Sport than any number of better records that have crossed my path. The reason for this, I’ve come to realize, is because what the Bristol-based duo have essentially done here is made an album that surprisingly avoids conceptual stasis at the expense of bracing song craft. But let’s start from the beginning. Fuck Buttons’ 2008 debut, Street Horrrsing, is fundamentally a noise record, but one for listeners who would normally have no need for such a thing. It's the fascinating dialectic between traditional tones and dissonant sonics that makes for a rather arresting listening experience, regardless of genre. As beautiful as it is unsettling, Street Horrrsing bridged a divide which most acts of a similar outlook would never even attempt. And this is exactly why Tarot Sport has turned into more of an internal debate than an album for me. I should probably point out that there is nothing particularly “wrong” with anything here—from a technical standpoint, the album is nearly beyond reproach. But at the same time, I just can’t shake Tarot Sport’s conspicuous sense of compromise, which unfortunately permeates a majority of the album’s smoothly rendered musical texture.

At the very least, what Fuck Buttons haven’t neglected this time out is their preternatural ability to lead with their best foot forward. Expertly executed opener, “Surf Solar,” announces the band’s change of direction almost immediately and for 10 glorious minutes makes you forget comparative analysis entirely. Gone are the previous album’s harsh overtones, replaced by a wall of cleanly administered synths and a low-end in obvious reverence to the indelible headlong march of post-acid house electronic music. A hypnotic rush of shimmering synth, seamless samples and a newfound dedication to 4/4 pound, “Surf Solar” evidences a young band stretching the limits of its narrow sound, consolidating their nascent power and sculpting the results to a high gloss. And it works exceedingly well—for ten minutes.

By contrast, the remainder of Tarot Sport features six tracks that each amount to rehashes of previous highlights, whether that be “Surf Solar” itself or a couple instances of re-chiseled Street Horrrsing cacophony. The ghostly fury of Street Horrrsing’s “Ribs Out” is actually re-imagined on Tarot Sport on two separate occasions. The first and most blatant example is “Rough Steez,” a horribly named piece—like "Ribs Out," sequenced in the track two-spot—that basically muffles the martial pound of its predecessor and replaces the disembodied vocals with some squelchy synth turns. Later, the clicking low-end of “Phantom Limb” breaks the record out of its mid-album stupor with some much-needed vocal-intrusion, but the track’s presence here feels more obligatory than spontaneous, an attempt at satiation more so than unforced inspiration.

As alluded to before, however, the meat of the album consists largely of lengthy, quasi-minimal electronic workouts, each more homogenous and toothless than the last. The best of these, the arcing, militaristic “Lisbon Maru,” nicely evokes its titular war vessel without resorting to overly fluid musicianship, something that album centerpiece “Olympians” outright revels in. Apparently inspired by William Basinski’s landmark ambient opus, The Disintegration Loops, yet with none of that album’s evocative sense of devolution or pervasive drama, “Olympians” is instead content to ride its waves of glassy synth and pulsating beat toward the realm of pure innocuousness. The blame/credit for this streamlined approach can be attributed to dance producer Andrew Weatherall, who systemically strips the dynamic range from John Cummings’ impressive work on Street Horrrsing, thus transforming an exciting experimental electronic act into an agreeably long-winded synth-rock act. This isn’t even a matter of accessibility as much as concession disguised as restless creativity. Even the heavily distorted vocal exorcisms of Street Horrrsing have been lost in the transition. Instead, what we’ve been left with is a sonic skeleton, formally kept in tact but sucked dry of nearly all arterial flow.

After staking out this new path for about 40 minutes of harmless foreplay, Tarot Sport spends its final 19 spinning its wheels. Penultimate track and watered-down “Surf Solar” approximation “Space Mountain” is totally expendable and bears little discussion outside of its recycled flagrance. And “Flight of the Feathered Serpent,” a pretty but prosaic piece not unlike “Olympians,” certainly sounds like a closer, but probably wouldn’t even stand out on one of the weaker entries in Kompakt’s Total series. The track can be seen as Tarot Sport in microcosm, endlessly reiterating the value of its beautiful exterior in hopes that its hollow interior can remain unacknowledged. Put Tarot Sport in a room with any other noise record and it gets its ass kicked; drop it on a dance floor and it’ll collapse in on itself before the drugs take effect. In Fuck Buttons’ search for common ground, they’ve unwittingly shone an unflattering light on their least interesting aspects, riding it out as if duration equals substance with little regard for the careful dynamics that made them so bracing in the first place.

Last Word: A tiring let-down coming after last year’s bracing debut, Bristol-based duo Fuck Buttons strip the noise from their formerly potent attack, emerging instead with frequently pretty synth-rock.

Review By:
Jordan Cronk

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