Product Description

Third album from Birmingham's retro-futurist electronic popheroes follows 2003's 'Haha Sound'. Whilst retaining the trademark sonic influences of their earlier work - 60s librarymusic, Krautrock and psychedelia - it has a more song basedapproach than previous releases, using sparse, minimalist arrangements as a framework for abstract lyrics created through automatic writing. Includes the single 'America's Boy'.

Track Listing

1. I Found the F
2. Black Cat
3. Tender Buttons
4. America's Boy
5. Tears In The Typing Pool
6. Corporeal
7. Bit 35
8. Arc Of A Journey
9. Michael A Grammar
10. Subject To The Ladder
11. Minus 3
12. Goodbye Girls
13. You And Me In Time
14. I Found The End

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67408 in Music
• Released on: 2005-09-19
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the first `rock' bands to sign to Warp Records, Birmingham's Broadcast have pretty much come to define the label's shift from techno futurism to a home for blurred-boundary experimentalism of every stripe. Tender Buttons finds the group stripped down to a core duo of Trish Keenan and James Cargill, it finds the band's formative influences - the Dr Who vibes of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the mantric repetition of Krautrock, and the blissful impulse of American psychedelia - presented in bare, unfussy arrangements that lack the murky ambience and meticulous layering of their earlier work.

Luckily, it's an impulse that suits Broadcast's new emphasis on lyrics: see the excellent "Michael', where Keenan serenades the song's subject with a stream of cute phrases and bizarre non-sequiters ("C'mon, your father was a teddy-boy/ There's nothing written on your finger-nails"), or "Black Cat" - references to Masons and Pharaohs, not to mention lines cribbed from Alice In Wonderland, cooed over sparking synth-lines. The emotional content is never clear or straight-talking, but it's this sense of warm, fuzzy logic that's possibly Broadcast's greatest strength - Louis Pattison

Customer Reviews

Try a little tenderness!
Now stripped to the core duo of singer Trish Keenan and multi-instrumentalist / programmer James Cargill, Broadcast's thrid album places a greater emphasis on song-writing and lyricism, and less on sonic experiment. Whereas 'Ha Ha Sound' was a sprawling epic of icy lullabye and often abrasive rythmic and textural abstraction, 'Tender Buttons' has less distractions and is more fine-tuned, but is overall perhaps not as impressive a record. Opener 'I Found the F' pitches Nico-esque vocals against live-sounding drum breaks and heavily distorted keyboards - continuing and refining Broadcast's damaged, analgogue soundscape with excellent results. Elsewhere the rythmns are more overtly synthetic and minimal, and the pounding percussive assaults of 'Ha Ha Sound' largely forgotten. 'Black Cat' displays mildy gothic sensibilities against typically deranged loops of synth and guitar, not dissimilar to Ladytron's latest. Edgar Allan Poe goes electro, anyone? Other highlights include the My Bloody Valentine-tinged and politically loaded 'America's Boy', and the gentle 'Tears In The Typing Pool', which shows a great aptitude for writing ballards (and could almost be a slightly less countrified Neko Case). Throughout the record there are fine lyrical touches (all included in the inlay card), with the vocals seemingly brought into greater focus than on previous efforts - the best tracks seem built around the vocals rather than the other way around. All in all its an impressive album, but sometimes lacking in the sonic adventure that defined 'Ha Ha Sound'.