Fuck Buttons

Tarot Sport

Somebody must have given Benjamin John Power and Andy Hung some serious Paxil. On Fuck Buttons’s debut, Street Horrrsing, the British noise duo was all elbows and knees: It was a jittery, brutal 14-year-old trash-bag-wearing slam dancer of an album. Now, a year later, with Tarot Sport, it sounds like that skunk-haired dive kid got a good scrubbing and a trip to Barney’s. On the one hand, she’s a hell of a lot more likely to get that summer internship at McSweeney’s. But on the other she’s, well, scrubbed. Scoured. (Fuck) buttoned down.

The band has made a similar transformation with their sophomore album—while their sound has sharpened and deepened with age, it has also mellowed. On Tarot, the band seems to be embracing the flair for melody that appeared only peripherally in their earlier work. On Horrrsing, the lovely lines of the pair’s songwriting lay deep—almost hidden—beneath all the buzz and crackle like the armature of a Giacometti sculpture.

On Tarot, those sweet, dreamy melodies are out in the open. The duo’s love of a hook is especially apparent on songs like “Space Mountain,” a sugary loop of straightforward electronica that evokes what Jacob’s ladder would look like if he’d dreamed it in the year 3000. While that track and its fellows—no clunkers on this record—are beautiful, richly layered, and intensely compelling, none of them have the raw-nerved temerity of a song like “Ribs Out,” from Street Horrrsing, which echoed not with glossy reverb and sleigh bells but with wicked bone-drummed bass lines and the cries of unknown birds. Tarot Sport goes beyond any of Aladdin’s seduction by trying to take us to the moon on a magic carpet. And at times it succeeds—but it does so only at the expense of the jungle-cat ferocity that made Horrrsing so revelatory.

I won’t argue with those who love this record—it’s sophisticated, nuanced, and emotionally resonant (not to mention, especially in contrast to Fuck Buttons’ earlier efforts, eminently listenable). Themes are introduced, built, razed, and renovated with a genuinely surprising mix of power and delicacy—you feel like you’re watching a time-lapse camcorder that’s been aimed at those seven hills along the Tiber River for the past 2,500 years.

Most of the songs on the album build slowly and then end abruptly after their climax, as if Power and Hung couldn’t bear to watch the sonic towers they so carefully built fall to dust. There are very few albums these days that one can legitimately describe as “shimmering,” but this album is, quite literally, a gem, one cut, and polished, and set with all the care and craft of a master lapidary.

But for all its breathtaking moments, I can’t help but wonder if Tarot Sport is the destiny I’d want for a band like Fuck Buttons. For a band whose very name is an attack on convention, for a band working in a genre that woke from the ashes of post-rock and raised itself on scummy Moogs and broken toys, for a band whose first album rang its barbaric yawp into the black-ribbed echo-chamber of the Aughts, for a goddamn noise band—I have to wonder if this is all there is. If they couldn’t have put out a louder, harder, crueler, better record. If all dirty-soled, sloe-eyed dive kids really have to grow up.

­—Katherine Orazem

Weezer

Raditude

It’s almost unfortunate that Weezer’s 1996 album Pinkerton was both refreshingly unique and hugely successful. A combination of pop, punk, and alternative rock, Pinkerton gained a cult following of underground music lovers and indie fans. But Rivers Cuomo, lead singer and guitarist, never meant for his audience to get that impression of his band. In fact, he hated Pinkerton. He told Entertainment Weekly it was a “hideous record” and a “huge mistake.”

Weezer fans (or ex-Weezer fans) have their panties in a bundle about the band’s recent transition to the blockbuster pop scene, wondering why off-beat songs like “Undone: The Sweater Song” have been replaced by covers of Lady Gaga and MGMT: They’ve created a mashup of “Kids” and “Poker Face,” two of the most ridiculously popular songs in circulation today. Also featured on their new album, Raditude, are tunes and titles like “Can’t Stop Partying” and “I’m Your Daddy.”

We have to face the facts: Weezer is a pop band. Raditude is completely mainstream, no regrets. There is little lyrical complexity at all, and none of the quirkiness that characterized Pinkerton and The Green Album. There is no discernible satire in tracks such as the love song “Trippin’ Down the Freeway,” in which the singer proclaims, “You broke down and told me you loved me true / I said, ‘Girl, I got to be with you.’” The band even features Lil’ Wayne in its rap-infused song “Can’t Stop Partying.” Cuomo might be making fun of the emptiness of his pop-star metamorphosis in this track when he extols the ghetto-fab lifestyle (“gotta have the cars / gotta have the jewels”), but he isn’t being bitingly ironic. He’s just being funny.

In addition to producing a celebratory status quo album, Weezer reached out to the masses by working with Motorola to advertise their current tour. College students can vote for their schools to win the CLIQ (new Motorola phone) challenge: The school with the largest “CLIQ” by the end of the competition gets a free Weezer show on campus, plus a cash prize. Weezer has no problem opening the door for people to say they are selling out. They just want to sell out shows.

We must appreciate the album for what it is: a well-crafted, catchy, pop-rock album. It’s at least as fun to listen to Raditude as it is to listen to Maladroit, and much easier. The songs are upbeat and the album is teeming with gargantuan hooks. The track “Put Me Back Together” is a classic tale of the awkward escapades of a geek in love. The leading single from the album, “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” has the potential to be seriously overplayed on any Top 40 radio station.

The most important track on the album, “Run Over by a Truck,” only appears on the deluxe version. Cuomo talks about being tired of trying to better himself, saying he’s “happy just to sing” now. It’s clear throughout the album that Cuomo is just having a good time.

And for those who still cling to Pinkerton and insist that Weezer used to be a great band—marginalized and talented—there is no reason to make fun of Raditude. The joke’s on us. Weezer has no desire to keep up street cred or placate picky fans who fear change. They’re in it for the hits.

—Nicole Battaglia

Wale

Attention: Deficit

The hip-hop community ought to sit in on Intro to Statistics, in which students learn that “correlation does not imply causation.” Just because a large number of good artists sound different from the mainstream does not mean that those who sound different from the mainstream are automatically good artists. This cultural trend is responsible for the fanfare around Wale’s recent mediocre mess of an album, Attention: Deficit.

Don’t get me wrong. Not only do I generally like Wale, but I also believe that he certainly has potential as an artist. It’s just a tragedy that his 2008 The Mixtape About Nothing was ironically far more substantial than his label debut. The problems start with the production. At the very least, 50 percent or more of a given song’s hotness quotient is determined by the beat. The beats on this album are just not that great. “TV in the Radio” features an obnoxious horn section overlaid with way too much cymbal action and K’naan’s voice managing to create a negative synergy on the chorus by irritatingly crooning lines such as, “If it wasn’t so original then we’d be criminal.” The closest his beats get to palatable are on “World Tour” and “Shades,” but then again, other issues serve to prevent these songs from reaching “good” status.

Perhaps Wale thought that having a slew of big-name featured artists was the formula to an essential album. However, a crucial requirement is for those artists to sound good with the album artist. Of the nine or so features on Attention: Deficit, only Bun B and Marsha Ambrosius manage to avoid deleteriously affecting their feature tracks. Pharrell really should stick to producing and clothing design, as the only word that completely does justice to his off-tune crooning on “Let It Loose” is “bad.” Lady Gaga, somewhat a joke of an artist herself, manages to combine inane lyrical content with a pretty terrible job of singin’ on the main single “Chillin.’”

But perhaps the largest component of the problem is Wale himself on the album. The man seems to have really lost the vision that he had back with The Mixtape About Nothing. There’s no sense of the album here, no larger picture constructed that goes further than the fact that he makes songs for a living. In the absence of any sort of concept, his weaknesses are made all the more apparent. His distinctly high-pitched, erratically strained voice is more annoying than ever, and it seems that his success has caused him to become more comfortable with a lack of technical precision in his rapping. His hook on “Chillin’” is just embarrassing: “DC Chillin / PG Chillin / My name Wale and I came to get it / Came to get it came to get it / My name Wale.” He also relies on way too many pauses to sustain his flow at any given point. So, although he carried through his mixtapes on the pure strength of his lyrical content and wordplay, his flow has either stagnated or gotten worse.

It’s frustrating, then, that at the album’s end, Wale claims that he is hip-hop, past, present, and future. Though I agree with him that he has the ability to spit over any beat, the quality of his rapping itself ensures that he won’t even be mentioned in the same breath with giants like Wu-Tang, Nas, and Rakim. He may be hip-hop today, but unless he gets better, I can’t foresee any future for him but a deficit of attention. The only thing I had on my mind while listening to Attention: Deficient was command-Q.

—Tyler He