Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport

It’s hard not to wonder whether, in a few hundred years’ time, people might not look back on 2009 as the beginning of the end. When we’ve managed to wreak a hitherto unprecedented amount of havoc on our planet’s natural systems, and the sci-fi option of attempting to escape our increasingly hostile living prison is beginning to look ever more appealing, will people look back at our generation - who flicked the switch on the first machine humankind ever built with the potential (however minimal) to instantly destroy ourselves in a cataclysmic inversion - as the moment where it all went from bad to worse? Luckily for us all, the Large Hadron Collider at Cern didn’t trigger the birth of an Earth-eating black hole, but as far as Fuck Buttons’ Tarot Sport is concerned it might as well have done.

The closest approximation to witnessing your entire world’s basic physical properties distort and shift around you, accelerating to break point before merely ceasing to be, Fuck Buttons seem pretty damned excited by this development. From start to finish, Tarot Sport pulls the listener through ever heightening rushes of serotonin that at times threaten to overwhelm entirely. Put simply, it’s fucking magical.

The full ten-minute version of ‘Surf Solar’ blazes from the starting line in a whirl of fluorescent colour, gradually building momentum across its length until its core finally goes nova, decimating light years’ worth of sonic debris before finally receding. After being cruelly chopped down to a shadow of its current self for the radio edit a couple of months ago, it’s a stunning resurrection. Still, even mid-way through such a dramatic opener it remains apparent that Fuck Buttons are still taking the same fundamental approach to song-building that they did with Street Horrrsing – a series of simple repetitions, each stretched to breaking point before the next shift. Both ‘Olympians’ and ‘The Lisbon Maru’ could almost have appeared on their debut, such are the tectonically slow movements that propel their surprisingly fragile melodic structures.

Yet given an adrenaline shot of focus, Tarot Sport hones the Buttons’ occasional vague excesses into something sleek and streamlined, bookended by the most apocalyptic rave music this Earth has ever witnessed. They’ve been performing closer ‘Flight of the Feathered Serpent’ for a couple of years now, but in recorded form its thumping techno flex is certainly the finest nine minutes they’ve ever recorded – an ever-escalating, tribal thing that twice sends trails of firework vapour blazing into the night sky.

It’s hard to keep count of the number of identikit Ibiza dance compilations released every year with the same scantily clad partygoers on the cover promising pure, unadulterated thrills. Tarot Sport’s mere existence is tantamount to sending them all to the corner with a dunce cap jammed firmly on their collective head – this is what real euphoria sounds like. It’s managed to tap into the spirit of reckless abandon of nineties dance music in the least obvious way, and the results are stellar. If you need any more evidence, look closer at the cover: I’m pretty sure that if you concentrate hard enough, that mess of fleshy appendages resolves itself into an immaculately tanned girl in a bikini.

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