Fuck Buttons – 'Tarot Sport' review
A quick Fuck Buttons crash course: two bedroom electronica mavericks with screwy imaginations make a Mogwai-meets-acid-house debut on home-made equipment. The result, Street Horrrsing, is relentless, pulsating, brittle, often terrifying and frequently beautiful, and quite unlike what’s been before.
Now, for round two, the pair have toughened up, but at the expense of much of the tension and fragility that accompanied their debut. Gone are the feral yelps and clattering, arrhythmic drums, in their place a new feeling of control. Gone is the sense of no one, not least the band, having much idea of what happens next, in its place a deliberate sense of planning and composition. It’s clearly the same musicians, but with altered ambitions, and behind the bulk of these changes is producer Andy Weatherall, whose Screamadelica-tinged fingerprints are all over these tracks, for better and for worse.
The outcome is a more finely crafted record than Street Horrrsing whose peaks, particularly the mesmerising Flight of the Feathered Serpent, surpass those of its predecessor. However, the duo’s diminished punk mentality also allows tracks to meander, most noticeably on Olympians, the LP’s dull centrepiece, which has more interest in a lucrative BBC ident or car advert than the pugilism and uncompromising terror of Fuck Buttons at their best.
All this is not to say, however, that Tarot Sport isn’t a toweringly impressive piece of work in its own right – it is – but there’s a also lingering hint of a once-wild beast having been tamed.
8/10
