Best CD We Got In The Mail: Fuck Buttons Tarot Sport

in brilliant fashion with “Surf Solar,” simultaneously taking us into the future and back into retro territory. Bubbling synths coated in layers upon shimmering layers of reverb give way to buried shoegaze noise and razor-like arpeggios, reminiscent of those spun so effortlessly by Underworld in their electronic epics of yore. Imagine, if you will, “Juanite/Kiteless/To Dream of Love” run through an array of equalizers, then recorded onto cassette tape and blasted out of Skywalker Labs’ most heinous digital soundsystem. This is the sonic equivalent of visible light breaking the laws of eletromagnetism and optics, refusing to be bent into its constituent colors, and scattering itself across oblivion. (Read the rest after the jump!)

All innocent hyperbole aside, one senses immediately that Tarot Sport is, in its totality, the sound of radio waves escaping a vacuum.
Andrew and Benjamin equal the majesty of the opening track with “The Lisbon Maru,” another grandiose tone poem, but one propelled instead by marching military rhythms and staccato synth chords dancing atop beatific melodies.  And by god, if they don’t up and steal the crown of epic ecstacy straight out from under Anthony Gonzalez’s feet with the fittingly-titled “Olympians,” then there is no justice in the universe. The song rather defies explanation, but practically demands the listener stand inside a room outfitted with rows of speakers to feel every aspect of the waves pummeling their senses. It is boundless and easily one of the best songs ever put to tape. From Mount Olympus, Fuck Buttons ascend to “Space Mountain” where this sublime bombardment of sound reminds us all of music’s inexplicable hold on the mind.
The album comes to a close fittingly on “Flight of the Feathered Serpent,” as the melodies suggest a lift-off rather than a terminus, defying the set time of Tarot Sport, an album so bloody brilliant that it deserves it’s own fuckin’ shrine so that children can be shown that in 2009, Fuck Buttons stared at the monolith of ecstatic noise that is Loveless, and dared to dethrone it.  Bravo.