Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/10/09
Label: ATP Recordings

The great thing about being unique is not having to compete with anyone else. The downside is that you don't have anyone to compete with but yourself. F*ck Buttons - the lime-veined, future-club, widescreen-noise moniker of London pair Ben Power and Andy Hung - managed to carve out their own niche in the avant-garde scene with last year's awesome "Street Horrrsing" album, but it was a niche that welcomed communal ecstasy more than it did noise awkwardness, by turns obtuse and colossally emotive.

If ears could eat, F*ck Buttons would be six packs of skittles chewed simultaneously, burning away the inner lining of your mouth. It was that sugary accessibility that really cast them adrift from so many dullard, antisocial noise contemporaries - and it's why their follow-up, "Tarot Sport", is so worthy of your attention. Maybe you're unwilling to surrender that attention - maybe you suppose there are other, more instant fixes for your ears. This is unimportant: F*ck Buttons will take those ears whether you like it or not.

Opener "Surf Solar" is a case in point - its synths fitting into life like the swirling swells that introduced us to Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavilion", a thudding four-four beat suddenly grabs the track up by the scruff. From here on in it's ten minutes of epic surge, instruments and your attention span driven out into the sun to melt together, locking you in where other noise bands will push you away. "Tarot Sport" takes the bloodthirsty, Balearic bliss "Street Horrrsing" hinted at and explodes it, until the whole thing's utterly danced - given club stalwart Andrew Weatherall mans production, that can't be surprising.

Weatherall's done similar things to rock music before, to New Order and Primal Scream, but never on such a grand and vivid scale. This album has moments that are more cinema than soundtrack. Saying that, it also has its déjà vu moments - the way "The Lisbon Maru"'s subdued groans build into a tectonic shift is reminiscent of "Street Horrrsing"'s "Sweet Love For Planet Earth", while the suspicion remains that all of these tracks should really be accompanied by rushing panoramas of African savanna shot from a helicopter.

This hardly matters though, in the grand scheme of things; the grand scheme of things being where F*ck Buttons operate, their expansive noise visions - realised best here in "Olympians"' staggering vastness - brilliantly anathema to willful scenester anonymity. As much U2, New Order and Jan Hammer as they are The Field, Harmonia and Black Dice, ultimately F*ck Buttons are in a league of their own - and with "Tarot Sport", they just bettered themselves.

    by Kev Kharas