Somewhere between 2003’s Haha Sound and the recently released Tender Buttons, Broadcast lost two members. Maybe it’s the band’s new configuration as a duo, or perhaps it’s simply the ravages of time, but Tender Buttons is a far different animal from its predecessor. To be fair, so was Haha Sound; but while the 2003 album was a far lusher, more evocative take on the brooding, distant psychedelia of The Noise Made By People, Tender Buttons is not so much an extension of previous work as it is a discontinuity. The cinematic scope is gone, and most of the songs are buried in far more static and distortion than anything previously. The exceptions to the new regime are equally curious; “Tears In The Typing Pool” and the title track are extremely spare and organic, anchored by the vocals of Trish Keenan and muted guitar.

“America’s Boy” is more representative of the album’s makeup, and sounds as though the backing track was piped through an old television with bad reception. Broadcast has always evoked a mood resembling a past depiction of an industrial future long dead; this aesthetic was most obvious on earlier instrumental tracks like The Noise Made By People’s “Dead The Long Year.” The songs were echoes of an ancestry obsessed with progress and technology; they sounded like pristine lullabies shot through a distorted lens, filled with reverb and static. Tender Buttons feels far more immediate in a sense; less reminiscent of the past and less evocative of the future, the album loses out on much of the atmosphere of previous work. In its place is a new sort of sound that seems to communicate something equally interesting; what that is, I don’t quite know.