Fuck Buttons: Tarot Sport

The Fuck Buttons’ lore is almost too perfect. Andrew Hung grew up a fan of Aphex Twin’s dense experimental electronica. Benjamin John Power was inspired by Scottish post-rock juggernaut Mogwai. The two met in a Bristol art school, and recording commenced. But sometimes “too perfect” is just a cockeyed way of saying “meant to be”—because as contrived as the story sounds (at least when whittled down for the sake of journalistic fluidity), Fuck Buttons has proven that its ventures into larger-than-life collisions are hugely successful and seemingly organic. If the duo’s 2008 debut, Street Horrrsing, represents the uncontainable results of the group’s exploratory atom-smashing, the follow-up, Tarot Sport, is an attempt to capture that unwieldy energy and bend it into recognizable shapes. For most of the songs amassed here, it still takes around 10 minutes to get the job done—threading those thick synthesizer blasts and all that skittering digital manna through a brick wall of guitar fuzz—but Fuck Buttons succeeds at turning its unpredictable epics into masterpieces of pacing and strange beauty. This has the unforeseen side effect of bestowing interlude status upon the album’s two five-minute songs, the rhythm-intensive “Rough Steez” and “Phantom Limb,” but even marathons like “Olympians” are digestible, playing like old M83 songs done as spiraling and vast as that act’s galactic namesake.