Broadcast - Tender Buttons - "It sounds like a record made with broken synthesizers" is a description typically reserved for Boards of Canada, but it would certainly fit for the latest from Broadcast, although in quite a different manner. Tender Buttons sounds "broken" in a way that's much more abrasive and occasionally unpleasant, surrounded as always by the icy/semi-comatose vocals of Trish Keenan. A female lead singer of a pop or rock band (and despite the electronica label that gets slapped on them, that's what Broadcast is and always has been) is almost by default a sex symbol (that's a sociological issue for another day), but Keenan will probably never have to worry about that, as her vocals seem to come out of a drugged out robot or something. They're about as close to inhuman vocals as you can have without using a vocoder, which is almost always a bad idea for any band that isn't going for full-out camp value, like Air, for instance.
Anyway, where Keenan's vocals have always been livened up in the past by lush backdrops that provide the human feeling that she seems to lack, here they are replaced by minimalist electronic beats that strip away whatever feeling is left. There is nothing "tender" about Tender Buttons.
However, the change in direction is never a bad thing this time around, and it proves to be a great way to keep the Broadcast sound fresh. Tender Buttons has one quality that I may value above anything else in an album: it grows on you, revealing its subtleties little by little, and songs that may at first seem like a bunch of buzzing noise reveal themselves to have depth and character. Broadcast have yet to let me down, and this is another fine addition to their ever-creative catalogue.
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