Some of the obvious comparisons are unavoidable, so let’s get them over then move on. Animal Collective if they’d grown up listening to Pink Floyd instead of The Beach Boys. Black Dice if they plugged the midi cables in on all their gear so that it all stayed in time. Sonically, Fuck Buttons explores similar territory to those. Where they diversify is structurally. But there’s no doubting they are riding the same zeitgeist wave as the other two (though, zeitgeists not being quite what they used to, there’s not much fear of any of them crashing into the mainstream, or of taking precedence over any of the other current zeitgeists). Beyond those comparison’s, however, Tarot Sport offers its own takes on the sounds of now.
To describe Tarot Sport, you’d probably need to mention the distortion that most of the synth arpeggios and drones are running through. But it’s not an alienating noise. It serves much the same function as distortion has come to serve for rock guitars – turning small(er) sounds into lava fuzz. The other distinctive feature, and the one which really sets them apart from others in their ‘scene’, is their particularly English understanding of rhythm. It’s hard to imagine American indie-boys harnessing four-to-the-floor dance pulses so effectively. Fuck Buttons have grown in an environment where Acid House is both historically esteemed and important. The other factor which nails this, and can’t be underestimated, is the input of producer Andrew Weatherall. His landmark work producing Primal Scream’s Screamadelica is most pertinent to this album. Listen to the tambourine groove and snare rolls on ‘The Lisbon Maru’, or the 808 snare and claves in ‘Phantom Limb’ – pure 1990, only here buried in layers of reverb or distortion. Other similarities can be heard in the relatively laid-back tempos, as if later strands of ‘ardcore meant very little, and the very linear progression of most of the tracks. What Tarot Sport often feels like is that Fuck Buttons have discovered a trove of Weatherall outtakes from 20 years ago, some with layers of corrosion built up on them, others left out to parch and sunbleach, then attacked them with their own tools, looping and repeating favourite sections, adding grit and noise to create density. ‘Olympians’ builds layers of drone over a cyclical chord pattern and a electro-motorik beat for 10 minutes into a purely euphoric state, a classic dance comedown mood left when the elements break off in the final minutes. ‘Space Mountains’ turns every sound into pulsing rhythm via delays and tremolo gates, then rides them ecstatically for 9 minutes.
Tarot Sport received a fairly scathing review in The Wire recently. The main criticisms seemed to be an overall structural banality and the overuse of distortion which has it coming off as ‘noise-lite’. I think that these criticisms come from looking at the album the wrong way around. It is, fundamentally, an album of music made for the dance floor. That the sonic parameters have moved so far from established dance templates is testament to forward progress on Fuck Buttons’ part. But structurally, it’s the endless repetition of very simple building blocks which, like traditional house and techno, give these tracks their drive and enable them to induce that trance-like state which classic electronic dance music always aimed for. Tarot Sport is not watered down noise. It’s the sounds of the electro-futurist continuum, only in 2009, the future no longer sounds as mechanical and pristine as it used to.
Adrian Elmer
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