Broadcast are now stripped down to a duo, consisting of
multi-instrumentalist James Cargill and singer Trish
Keenan. Musically Tender Buttons reflects this change,
with their new songs constructed around
Cargill's sparse, grittily textured electronica. The
resulting sound is tougher and more insistent, a
succession of incessant rhythms layered with fuzziness
and distortion. On top of this foundation, the band's
(or duo's) shimmering, retro-futurist aura is
retained, but it appears less playful, more or less
purged of its antiquarian quirks. It is Keenan's
voice, however, that anchors the sound, tethering the
experimental textures and spare grooves to an
offbeat pop aesthetic. Sometimes the results are barely
songs at all — the title track is a series of musical
scales accompanied by murmured alliteration — but tautness and economy of
sound hold them together.
With an understated warmth to her crystalline voice,
Keenan is neither an ice-cool chanteuse nor a
confessional torch-singer, but rather an elliptical
mixture of both, a semi-detached narrator infused with
a pervasive, if low-key, melodicism. There's a very
English kind of melancholia being tapped into
intermittently, where angst is replaced by
wistfulness, as on "Tears in the Typing Pool" and
"Black Cat." Contrastingly, "America's Boy" is a
jaunty socio-political commentary, but from a viewpoint
that is an ironic critique of cultural stereotypes.
The more playful "Michael" is an unresolved meander
through hiccuping electronica, somehow slight but at
the same time persistent. This is all very non-rock,
but then nor is it overtly commercial or pop-oriented,
despite a certain melodic lightness of touch. In a
sense it occupies a vaguely defined space of its own,
which is probably both a blessing and a curse.
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