Customer Reviews

Tarot Sport (Dig)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When I listened to this album for the first time, a thought popped into my head: this is how My Bloody Valentine would sound like if they traded in their drums and guitars for keyboards! It's fantastic!

This album is a bit more accessible than their last, and equally as enjoyable. The album is made up of series of long tracks, each of them multi layered and complex. There's a lot going on here, so beware: this album might be best enjoyed via headphones and a heaping dose of concentration. Nestled in those tracks you'll find moments of shimmering beauty, and moments of (sometimes) ugly loudness, but it'll all make sense when you hear it.

Let's see, the band's name is pointlessly vulgar, the album and song names seem to have come out of a random word generator, there's no singing, no melody and the songs are endlessly repetitive, all of which makes for a record that is...utterly thrilling! If Steve Reich, Brian Eno ("Another Green World") and Primal Scream ("Xtrmntr") had a love child, this record would be it. And that's a good thing.

If you insist that pop music must consist of standard verse and chorus, with neatly structured melodies and singing, this isn't for you. But if you are open to the sonic possibilities of modern music, this is one mind-blowing record. FB manages to make music that is mind-pulverizing, fantastically energizing and cerebral all at the same time, a pretty impressive trick. What they do best is layer sound and rhythms and counter-rhythms together, and then keep adding more and more layers until the songs build into something of staggering proportion. Yet order somehow comes out of chaos. "Olympians" is the best track, which builds into an organ chord progression (all of this probably comes out of a synthesizer) that is nothing short of majestic. The organ then recedes and gives way to a series of high synthesizer tones that is, yes, wonderfully melodic. "Lisbon Maru" isn't far behind, with its devastating fuzz-bass-like riffs and marching-band-on-speed drumming. My only complaint is with the last track, "Phantom Limbs," which is marred by cheesy grade-B sci fi movie sound effects.

If FB can build on the best ideas here, they could come up with some amazing stuff. To me, this is the best record of 2009, edging out other great indie records by Animal Collective, Antlers, Grizzly Bear, etc. If you're open to a little adventure and aren't afraid of a little sonic chaos, you should check this out. (I can't believe I'm only the 3rd reviewer -- this stuff needs to be heard!)

I cannot stop listening to this album. I have listened to the track "Lisbon Maru" dozens of times, and I never get bored of it. "Rough Steez" has recently been captivating me. "Olympians" and "Space Mountain" are some of my favorites. This band is amazing at layering sounds and building beats that continue without being boring. The album as a whole is an outstanding progression of tracks that adds to the enjoyment. Where their album "Street Horrrsing" was hard to listen to for me, this album has become a constant inhabitant of my "Now Playing" list.

I rated this at 5 stars. However, I realize that this album is not for everyone. I discovered this band with this album and I've shared songs with many of my friends. What many say is that the songs are boring or repetitive. These songs have no vocals, and many times, beats continue through the middle of a song, which many people find grating or annoying. If you liked "Horrrsing," though, you will love this album.

And I thought I wouldn't like this! There aren't a whole lot of ideas on this album, but the Buttons manage to throw together a nice, cohesive, if sonically punishing, album that pulsates with life, beauty, and infectious beats.

Buy this now! A new adjective should b invented to describe how good this is. Totally infectious.

I was browsing in a record shop one afternoon,after finishing work.There must have been about 10-15 other browsers,and the sales assistant put on "Tarot Sport"-by the end of the fourth song ,we were queing up to buy it.Deeply hypnotic,psychedelic electronica.

Lush in places and brutal in others. This is an awesome blending of sound and emotion. I was totally blown away.

'Rough Steez' alone is a revelation.

"Street Horrrsing" was a great record, but Tarot Sport is a cut above. Perhaps surprisingly, it's also a welcoming album--alongside such gems as Towers of Asia's "Something Something" debut, this is definitely a high point of 2009.

Beautifully structured melodic chords that Moby wishes he would have composed hammered down with some tough hard house Chemical Brothers style beats has made this my favorite album of the past year.

After listening to the first F Buttons album, I have to admit, I was skeptical to hear their second effort. I thought the first record was just another ho-hum, glitch-pop effort from one of the numerous groups trying to produce noisy electronic music. However, the one bright spot I found connected to the first record was the Andrew Weatherall Remix of the single "Sweet Love For Planet Earth". Having been a seriously hardcore fan of Weatherall for 20 years now, I make it a point to seek out everything he does, and this mix was far more interesting than any of the album versions. Well, apparently the F Buttons themselves agreed with me, because what they heard made them feel that they could do well to have Weatherall right there in the studio with them helping them twiddle the knobs, and bring his unparalleled creativity into the mix. And boy, was that ever a good decision on their part.
Tarot Sport is some kind of brilliant album. It's a quantum leap from their first album, and Weatherall's production qualities are all over this record, to the point of it sounding more like a Weatherall album than anything else. For those who were around in the early 90's, and loved Weatherall's band, Sabres Of Paradise, you will find a lot to love on Tarot Sport. Making a comeback on this album are disparate melodies, the meshes of sounds, the rolling drum patterns, and the overall euphoric quality of the music. This entire album sort of reminded me of how I felt when I first heard "Smokebelch" back in 1993..simple music, but taken to its most lush extreme.
And that is really what Tarot Sport is all about. It takes very basic ideas & melodies and transforms these sounds into something altogether different. It's not enough to simply sit back and add a good beat to these melodies. Weatherall takes as many elements as possible and presents layer upon layer of sounds, making it a piece of music worth listening to many times. Simply hearing this album once won't be nearly enough to catch all of the many pieces at work here. Another reviewer referred to this album as an "electronic My Bloody Valentine", and I can see this point for sure. After all, Weatherall remixed My Bloody Valentine back in 1989 to huge and famous results.
Tarot Sport is definitely a record you want to listen to from beginning to end. The seven tracks all mix into one another flawlessly, and they are all given ample time to breathe (the average track length is 8 minutes-plus). The albums opening track is hard-nosed and intense, evolving mightily to the closing track, which is energetic and heart-breaking. Once again, though, I can't overstate the importance of the production with this record; it is simply phenomenal.
Maybe I'm letting my love of Weatherall cloud my perception of this record, but I find it hard to believe that F Buttons on their own could have made Tarot Sport sound anything like this without him. Given how rudimentary and average their first record was, this second effort is a massive step forward. It achieves something difficult in that it carries elements of techno, house, breakbeat, and even trance into the mix, and does it all effortlessly. The last track on the album, "Flight Of The Feathered Serpent", flirts dangerously close with the tag "trance", yet it's far better than anything, say, Paul Oakenfold has ever done. I couldn't help but think while listening to this album that both Weatherall and Oakenfold started out together, and Oakenfold has been puking up the same, tired old trance noise for nearly 20 years now, while Weatherall, who has made music all over the spectrum, comes waltzing in and out-trances the trance-master with one full swoop. It really proves that Oakenfold's rigidness is no match for Weatherall's creativity and sense of self.
If anything, I hope people start digging around for Weatherall's other albums, singles, remixes, productions, etc, after hearing this record. There is plenty to find, and a lot of it is better than Tarot Sport. But in his 20 year-plus career of producing music, this is definitely one to remember for a long time.