15 essential Broadcast tracks and the records where you can find them

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tender buttons

Broadcast
‘Corporeal’
(From Tender Buttons, Warp, 2005)

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The release of Tender Buttons proved to be a catalyst for change among many of the group’s fans and detractors. Many who were attracted to the band’s retro psychedelia were uninterested in Tender Buttons‘ stripped-back, minimal sound, while others who were previously put off by the group’s maximalist indulgences suddenly found themselves intrigued by the duo’s new direction. Now sharing aesthetic similarities to groups like Young Marble Giants and Essendon Airport instead of Silver Apples and Fifty Foot Hose, the Broadcast of Tender Buttons also explored more personal and realist lyrical content with increasingly oblique strategies. They’d initially recorded an album’s worth of demos to shop around in the hope of acquiring additional personnel to flesh out the songs’ arrangements, but that band never materialized, leaving Keenan and Cargill to arrange the songs themselves.

In hindsight, it’s beguiling to imagine what these songs would’ve sounded like with a full band (you can get an idea in their live recordings from the period). Keenan said in a 2006 interview that “when you strum a guitar, there’s too much reality that comes with it. [Electronic and sample based music] was a good way into escapism… it was a way of fantasizing in songs, in a sense, but still describing my emotions.” Her hypothesis proved true on Tender Buttons, which featured more unobscured guitar than even the group’s work with Tim Felton.

During the writing and recording of the album, Keenan coped with the loss of her father to cancer, bringing more undisguised personal references into her songs as the rest of the texts became coded and cut-up. ‘Corporeal’ is one of the most explicit examples of this, and its percolating arrangement belies a lyrical conceit that can be viewed at least two ways – as an obtuse love song abstracting the nature of the human body into scientific terminology and evolutionary theory, or as the protagonist (presumably Keenan herself) looking at X-rays of a loved one and wanting to switch places with them, processing the confusion of the human body’s ability to fight and then suddenly give up against a devastating sickness. The insertion of her own experience, no matter how veiled, adds an additional weight to the impact of these already stark and powerful songs.