Tender Buttons is the third studio album by Broadcast and was originally released on 19th September 2005 by Warp Records. It harkened a change in style for the band - stripped down to its bare essentials, the music showed Broadcast under new lights, bringing Trish Keenan's bittersweet and often surrealist lyrics and vocals right at the forefront. Recorded entirely at Keenan and James Cargill's (bass) home in Birmingham and produced by the band, Tender Buttons is a far more intimate record than its predecessor. The lead single, "America's Boy", hinted at more minimalist soundscapes, and this is confirmed on the album. Yet, this serves Broadcast rather well. On songs such as "Superb Black Cat", "Goodbye Girls" or the annoyingly catchy "Michael A Grammar", Keenan and Cargill work around frail distorted electronics and interferences on which they add guitars, bass, and linear drum beats. Elsewhere, on the more subdued "Tears in the Typing Pool" or "You and Me in Time", they craft delicate backdrops out of guitars and subtle sine waves, evoking in places a space-age velvet underground. If Tender Buttons reveals a more purely electronic approach, Broadcast were miles apart from the electro glam of Goldfrapp. Their soundscapes have more in common with that of the Radiophonic Workshop than that of Giorgio Moroder.
