Fun and Games with Esoterica and Funky Gadgets

Fuck Buttons’ peculiarly titled Street Horrrsing was one of my albums of choice last year to accompany afternoons lazily wiled away in the company of a decent book and an ample supply of substances of dubious repute.  This wasn’t due to its surprising freshness nor because of its sophisticated experimentation between the interplay between the duo’s electronic whiz-bangery and the hoots and hollers of Andy Fung nor even because of the mesmerising, seemingly effortless emergence of sloppy supernovas of synthesised ecstasy on tracks such as Sweet Love For Planet Earth.

Actually, it was because of all of these things.  But more to the point, I liked it because for a couple of months there it became very cool to like the Fuck Buttons and when we get right down to it sometimes there’s nothing I like more than to follow the crowd.

So a year and an apparent age of touring, festivals, features, interviews and empty-headed buzz later and the FB’s have coughed up another album.  This second outing may well have pushed through the barrage of hyperbole and the aura of sleek of-the-momentness to enter into some deeper layer of jungle-howling off-the-wallness.  As it were.  However, such was not to be, Tarot Sport being a stronger, more coherent but ultimately far less imageresting* effort.

Things start well with Surf Solar opening with barrages of exploding wind chimes breaking across the ether, a grim beat soon kicking in accompanied by an edgy, chittering motif that badgers at one like a demanding child or some obsequious guest at a party.  And so it goes for the subsequent ten minutes, a synthesized theme suggesting star-bound glory fleshing things out in a manner that makes the ideal soundtrack to accompany digesting anything ever written by Peter F Hamilton.

Rough Steez is a coarser, shaggier, jowly beast – more of a break-dancing orang-utan than a pilgrimage across the stars – while The Lisbon Maru suggests greener climes, pleasant views of rolling green hills being afforded from one’s accelerating vantage point on the motor way.  So far so good, each track having been ground and polished to a fine sheen.  However one might suggest that the choice of stones** exhibits some lapse in ambition.  Perhaps it’s the sheer euphoria of it all, the sense that the darkly unique potential previously exhibited has crumbled into some brightly glowing fantasy, irrevocably severed from anything real, to be forgotten and disposed of afterwards.

The next track, Olympians, forms the album centrepiece and is the case in point.  Fung has said that it was named because ‘we thought it sounds like... the Olympics!’.  This is apt, washes of warm golden consonance tracing a clear take off down an endless runway towards an all-knowing oneness.  That’s the fantasy version.  The hard headed version is that it is Fuck Buttons’ do Vangelis, and have thus provided Sky Sports with the perfect soundtrack to the London games.

After a diversion down into the whirring gears and pistons of Phantom Limb, another climb is sighted, this time up Space Mountain.  It’s a gleeful ascent, a soaring guitar sound questing into the clouds above a dynamic mass of tinkling fairy lights far in the valley below, and makes for probably the most well-sculpted and compelling song on the album.  Then with the Flight of the Feathered Serpent, Tarot Sport concludes on an extended, almost nostalgic drum-machine-fuelled glide into the distance.

It’s difficult not to discuss the album in rather imagistic descriptive terms.  Unlike Street Horrrsing, it is bereft of vocals, a fact which apparently wasn’t originally planned, but which combines with the unrelenting dance-beats to lend the album an air of being mired in the machinery.  I suppose that it's a matter of expectations: if one is content with being treated to invigorating constructions of ecstatic visions, to the point of becoming lost in a greened-out dream-world, then this is it.


Fun ways to wile away the evening hours: Samarkand by Amin Maalouf, looking at disturbingly vivid colour photographs of Nazi Germany, Mr Pickwick's Camera by Cuthbert and the Night Walkers


* imageresting: a slightly pat compound word formed by jamming 'imaginative' and 'interesting' together as hard as possible
** in this metaphor the Fuck Buttons are wizened old gemologists, hunched laboriously over a glittering array of precious stones