heavy paraphernalia

The Fuck Buttons seem to be given a considerable amount of latitude for making essentially the same album twice, with last year's Street Horrrsing and the new Tarot Sport. That hardly matters listening to the album, once you’re hit with the sensational fix of leadoff track/10-minute single "Surf Solar". Famed producer Andrew Weatherall is involved here but Tarot Sport is still essentially the Fuck Buttons firing off a fuzzed stream of their recognizable, gratuitously shoegaze-influenced brand of drone-rock noise. The sweep and warped virtuosity of “The Lisbon Maru” and “Olympians” (which roughly forms the album’s middle segment) takes on a distinctive emotional resonance that is mostly absent from the Street Horrrsing songs, it must be said; the club-ready sonic fissures of “Phantom Limb” will have you riveted too.