F*ck Buttons 'Tarot Sport' (ATP) Released 12/10/09

**** Buttons play their songs live surrounded by the gadgets that make them all up; twisting and turning the knobs on their tables and moving their bodies accordingly to the rhythms and blasts of white noise conjured up by those very electronics. Usually they play in rooms with dimmed lights, to an audience of about 500. On occasion, nearly half the crowd has left early. It's because **** Buttons' grand, powerful output is more suitable for cliff-tops with a Daft Punk-pyramid-esque light show to boast. To see two normal looking,scruffily dressed men performing these sonic juggernauts takes nearly all of the romance out of hearing such daring, epic material on record.

And that brings me nicely to the word "epic", a word of which several will use to describe the second **** Buttons album and probably the first, but more so 'Tarot Sport'. For this record sports 5 songs (that's more than half) which span over the 8:45 minute mark, with the shortest spell of experimentation coming in at 4 minutes, 44 seconds. You approach 'Tarot Sport' and you expect it to drag: debut 'Street Horrrsing' was an uninviting, tiring listen encapsulating tribal chants with thick, relentless walls of sound. What makes this following offering so significant is its ability to keep the listener transfixed and on edge, largely thanks to the incorporation of, wait for it... melodies. Glossly and plentiful in saporous warmth, these are actual chords making up the likes of 'Olympians' and 'Flight Of The Feathered Serpent'. And when you compare this sort of song-production with that on the debut, this is as big a step to one side as 'First Days of Spring' or 'Primary Colours' is.

And so with added accessibility, 'Tarot Sport' becomes a magnetic force, luring you in with the scatterbrained, dotted keyboard chaos that opens 'Surf Solar' and ensuring you stay for the entirety with the sharp, hammering beat that follows. Eccentric tracks like 'Rough Steez', a song comprised of the piercing sound found if you twist something too much on a delay pedal, and 'Phantom Limb', a similarly obnoxious beat-ridden number so ruthless that when the retrospective and spacious breakdown arrives halfway through, it's the finest moment on the record. These energy-fueled tracks are cut down to shorter lengths, whereas the bright, illustrious 'Olympians' is prolonged to nearly eleven minutes. That's because it's the kind of song that aliens from another planet would fall in love with, the only **** Buttons song a young toddler might dance to in the living room (tell them it's by Fab Buttons, if they ask). It's miles and miles and miles of views towards the horizon or the furthest city from the tallest peak - it's absolutely life affirming.

There will come a time when "music" like this has a commercial survivability and can sell itself, in some form or another, to the masses. Then, we can witness this kind of gutsy modernisation being performed on the moon or with a 360° screen surrounding. This is, quite clearly, one of the few directions music can really urge itself to move onto in the coming decades if it wants to continue to break ground. **** Buttons are paving way and their development is crucial to providing a few more stepping stones that be accessed by aspiring artists in years to come.