Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

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Fuck Buttons – “Olympians”
(from Tarot Sport)

Lately, I’ve been a little reluctant to write too much about new music. Don’t get me wrong, I still think the whole “writing about music” thing has some value, but every time I read another thesaurus-less blogger gullibly slap the same gauche, overreaching adjectives on any moderately promising FLAC that streams across his torrent, or another eager-to-please reviewer try to justify wholly questionable historical antecedents on bands that barely qualify as upstarts for the sake of page hits or guest spots, I cringe. I’ve done it myself. It’s embarrassing. Worse, it’s insincere. As readers, as fans, it’s easy to get worn out and desensitized to repeated claims about the “greatest” this or the “most amazing” that. It stops meaning anything after a while.

And then I hear an album like Tarot Sport, and I think to myself, Well, shit. This is really fucking good. How else would I describe an album like this if I didn’t use words like “epic” and “Vangelis-esque” and “erupting with sweeping, psychotropic grandeur” and “the best album of the fourth quarter of 2009 (so far)”? I can’t. And so I’m back at square one.

I should back up a bit.

I didn’t much care for Street Horrrsing. Idiotic band name. Idiotic haircuts. And the music, the thing behind all the flashy cultural signifiers, was grating, preening, directionless, full of obnoxious brattles and yelps that neither shocked nor awed. But several folks, some of whose opinions I hold in high regard, thought differently. So I bit my tongue.

But when I heard the Buttons were tapping Andrew Weatherall to produce their next album, I softened my guard. Weatherall, after all, was one of the key figures who put the -adelica in Screamadelica, and it seemed unlikely he would make things worse. Now: I don’t want to overstate his importance. It’s possible he did little more than readjust microphone placement in the studio and press “Record.” I don’t know. But the transformation from the teeming mass of Danse Manatee-derivative noise on Street Horrrsing to what we get on Tarot Sport is nothing short of remarkable.

Perhaps the Animal Collective analogy is appropriate. This music goes beyond noise. It’s noisy, for sure, but here the dithering squabble of stereo distortion is spruced up and coupled with the blissful modulation of synthetic sine waves that embrace passionately and meaningfully, resulting in the climactic epiphanies of late-period post-rock (I’m thinking of, for example, Mogwai’s Happy Music for Happy People). Plus, there are the unmistakable tropes of dance music — the lithe, expansive percussion; the trance-inducing swooshes and hypnotically repetitive bleeps and boops — that set my heart racing and pupils dilating. The songs on Tarot Sport follow the structure and benchmarks of older music that I find familiar, and maybe that’s why I’m so willing to give myself over to the easy and well-tested moments of climax, but Fuck Buttons permute their influences here in a way that feels fresh and invigorating. Much like Animal Collective have done of their past few records, Fuck Buttons have taken the primordial, Ur-language universality of noise and pared it with more popular, futuristic forms of songwriting.

Ultimately, this is music that’s meant to be ascendant. Just look at the song titles — “Space Mountain,” “Surf Solar,” “Flight of the Feathered Serpent,” and the granddaddy of them all, “Olympians” — these tracks are designed for climbing over peaks and launching into the atmosphere. And you can feel it when you listen to it — upswing is followed by more upswing, crescendo is piled upon crescendo, and just when you think you’ve plateaued, just when you think you’ve reached as far as you can go, they find a way to take you higher yet. It’s like hopping aboard a Trimaxian Drone Ship and soaring weightlessly through the air at unimaginable speeds while the geometric shapes of developed land below parse and multiply and invert and reveal themselves to be parts of much larger patterns that could only be seen from this new, higher vantage point.

Groan.

I know, it’s all a bit overwrought, but isn’t that why we all subject ourselves to the continual headache that is the hunt for new music? For the occasional and absurdly grandiose “Eureka!” moment of discovery? It’s okay not to be embarrassed by that feeling when you find it.