It Doesn’t Matter What It Means: 20 Years of Broadcast’s 'Tender Buttons'

A whole register of feelings and resonances. Tender Buttons is exactly like this. It’s not about anything. If you were to say Trish Keenan’s writing here was automatic, dadaist, you would basically be right. If you were to say it is a dream transmission, some kind of Jungian exercise in exorcism, you would be right. There’s no narrative in Tender Buttons. But somehow, at the same time, there is. It’s a story you’ve made for yourself, just by listening to it. It’s a story of love. It’s a story about sex. It’s about whatever you want it to be.

Broadcast came out of the Birmingham of the mid-’90s. 1995 to be specific. They didn’t exactly set out to make the kind of music that they ended up making. They’ve joked but also been kind of not joking about their ambitions to be a Britpop group — that being in the air at the time. Their first full-length, The Noise Made by People, came five years later. An especially atmospheric kind of exotica, released on Warp Records. Obsessed with pastiche. Here is the conversation pit. Here is the shag rug. Here are the precious psych 45s in all of their naivete. Their sophomore album, Haha Sound, came out in 2003. A winsome thing that name-checks twee Czech vampire flicks. It was their first piece of music that felt fully fleshed out. Its own beautifully contained, perfect world. Full of fuzzscapes and reverberant drums. Warm and cozy. Freshly cut bangs and a Fair Isle sweater. Toy sailboats on a pond and the sky is like a big tangerine. This is the experience I always feel when I listen to a Broadcast record: this need to be descriptive about its impressionism, to paint the way I want the world to look to the tune of their dissonance. 

Tender Buttons, released in 2005, is less pretty than its predecessor. It is noisier. There is more static. In the band’s legacy, it is now their most beloved record. And I think this has something to do with what is being evoked here, the kinds of worlds that Trish Keenan and James Cargill are creating here as the band’s principle songwriters. How through the record’s interest and obsession with nonsense something really beautiful happens. There’s the syntax on “Corporeal,” when Keenan suggests that you do that to her anatomy, and how it sounds like a shorthand for sex, a defamiliarized provocation, done tongue-in-cheek over fuzz and delay, over bursts of noise that cut like glass shards. Or the Wendy Carlos baroque freakout of “Goodbye Girls,” where an arpeggiated synth loop is the backdrop for girls witnessing, girls noticing.

In an interview the band did in 2006, not long after Tender Buttons came out, Keenan described her relationship to making slightly electronic music as a “way to project emotions in a romantic way … a kind of metaphysical way.” Continuing on, she added that when you strum a guitar “there’s too much reality that comes with that.” What she is saying is that a Broadcast record is about escapism, but in that escapism there is a little something called emotional realism, that, underneath the impressionism, the images of birds and mountains and girls skating across frozen ponds, there are human feelings about mundane human things. Like love. How can you not feel that way when listening to “Tears in the Typing Pool”? This song is a guitar song, one of really exquisite minimalism. It’s all open chords, a little synth squiggle in the background. Here, Keenan sings of white plains, long distance runners stopped on the corner. All of it is obliquely poetic, but there is something about the way it all is modulated tonally, something about the way Keenan sings it, something about the way the guitars strum it, that feels completely expansive despite its simplicity. There’s something underneath Keenan’s lyrics, a mysterious subtext, that you can taste, that takes your breath away.

Tender Buttons was Broadcast’s last real album not because of any sort of band breakup, bad blood. It was their last formal album because in early 2011, Keenan died from complications of pneumonia at age 42. But the band’s legacy is unmistakable. Alive in so much music today. In listening to Tender Buttons you can feel that specter of death. It is hypnagogic music, music that sounds like a radio transmission from another time, from another world. So carefully constructed, it is music that almost feels breakable. That you could snap its neck with a velvet hammer. It is exactly what Keenan said it is: romantic and metaphysical. Impossible to read like Gertrude Stein’s poems were impossible to read. But that illegibility is what makes it perfect and precious. When you listen to the record’s title track, when those tinny drum machines and rocky synths burst and bloom in the air, it feels like a revelation. And when Keenan sings, when she tells us in her oblique and perfect prose, in the imperative, that we must die and cut, die and cut, you want to do that. Whatever it means. It doesn’t matter what it means. It never mattered what it meant.