(Photo Courtesy of Dog Triumph)In the past, the Norwegian pop duo Röyksopp has been accused of being “house for people who don’t like house;” the innocuous soundtrack of Volkswagen Jetta-driving, soy candle-lighting thirty-something folks who find their music at a Starbucks.
This is only true for those who had a brief but pleasant encounter with the group’s 2001 debut album “Melody A.M.” and never cared to check back in on the Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland’s later work. Maybe they heard “Remind Me” in a Geico commercial, felt affirmed in their taste and glibly moved on to other harmless music.
I mean, yeah, Röyksopp’s first two albums are the result of a beautiful but nonconfrontational pop architecture. “Melody A.M.” and “The Understanding” lend themselves to the sensation of passing with a tender step through a dimly lit room in the early morning, where jewels of light synths fall through the air — all in all, quite enjoyable and worthy of repeated listening but lacking true substance.
Substance, it seems, only arrives for Röyksopp when night begins to fall. 2009’s “Junior” saw the duo’s sound enter twilight — where a longing for the past, frustration over a mechanized heart and the reality that what you want is easy (but getting it is complicated) reign to marvelous effect. All this lyrical business pairs well with the album’s melding of a darker pop sound, electronic ambience and house in a manner that foreshadowed a great deal of chart-topping music in the years to come.
One year later, Röyksopp seemed to regress with a companion to “Junior,” the moody instrumental album “Senior.” For most, this foray into somber synths and meandering loops devoid of words was an unfortunate misstep for the Norwegian pop architects. The album’s rhythm drifts passively, lacking in the intricacy or “wow” moment of sonic ecstasy that define acts like Four Tet and Aphex Twin.
On past albums, the duo dropped in the occasional instrumental as a palate cleanser of sorts, and those were grand, well-constructed interludes; here, however, the album seems incomplete. For the Röyksopp fanatic (myself included), “Senior” is a frustrating listen. You know that there’s an immeasurably talented set of hands at work, but they aren’t used to their full potential. Fans shuddered, painfully aware that “Senior” reinvigorated the critical opinion that Röyksopp’s catalog belongs on the in-store soundtrack of a Crate and Barrel.
Last May, the duo moseyed back in the direction of its well-worn path with “Do It Again,” a 35-minute doozy of a dance-floor-friendly mini-album with Robyn, the minstrel responsible for "Dancing on My Own." The title track is a damn good accompaniment to hedonism of every flavor — how could it not be with a gleefully masochistic lines like “It hurts so good / I don’t want to stop” bathed in a shower of pulsing synth bursts?
The critics loved the album, going as far to say that it’d be dandy if the whole album was just a series of remixes of the title track. Personally, I hated it. You can barely hear a glimmer of Röyksopp’s unique architectural style amidst all this flashy pop candy. It’s ingeniously constructed, but it feels anonymous — assembled by some automaton in a windowless room that pulsates fervently with Top 40 tunes.
Ah, but the porridge is just right with the Berge and Brundtland’s latest (and last) album “The Inevitable End.” To pick up my metaphor from earlier about setting suns, Röyksopp did not overshoot the mark and land in the dead of night without the glow of substantive lyrics, nor does “The Inevitable End” adopt the easily injected and quickly forgotten sunshine approach found on a Starbucks’ house music sampler CD.
“The Inevitable End” is a near-perfect farewell to the traditional album format from the duo, a somewhat inconsistent but powerfully somber 62 minutes spread out across 12 tracks that offers up a thematically satisfying closure for the group.
Since the album was recorded with the knowledge that it would be Röyksopp’s last, a great deal of the album revolves around various things coming to an end. These are the indisputable high points of the album because if there’s one thing Röyksopp does well, it’s a song about things coming to an end — and all the pain, frustration and longing wrapped up in that.
“Monument (T.I.E. Version),” with the help of Robyn on vocals, offers mediation on what’s left behind for posterity after we are gone — or, more likely, after Röyksopp is no more. Beyond that, we’ve got “Sordid Affair,” a tribute to “insatiable lust clouding the truth” coming to its inevitable end amid an addictively melancholy beat. This is a number that seems to be the epilogue to “You Don’t Have a Clue” from “Junior,” a song best suited for playing at the end of a party when the stars are glimmering and everything has gone terribly wrong.
Thankfully, Röyksopp confronts the “(insert emotionally intense activity/relationship) is over, and now I’m sad” note with enough variation to avoid sounding like that obnoxious friend who's been sad about the same ill-fated love for two years.
“The Inevitable End” is doubly rewarding for fans of Röyksopp’s previous work, as this album pays frequent tribute to the duo’s earlier sounds (shimmering bursts of synths, minimalist but masterful rhythms, etc.) in sublime conjunction with mournful melodies and heavier bass tones.
I now skip ahead to the final two tracks, “Coup De Grace” (or deathblow) and “Thank You,” as the middle of the album is a mostly forgettable expanse of generic dance beats (minus “Here She Comes Again,” which takes the allure of the sad girl aesthetic in an enjoyable, if unoriginal direction). This mid-album lull is excusable only due to the album’s strong start and top-notch end.
“Coup De Grace,” a hauntingly beautiful three-minute instrumental, is a time when minimalist pop composition works in Röyksopp’s favor. Just before the two-minute mark, the pulsating synths that sound like they’ve been echoing in an abandoned hall swell to a crescendo of incredible emotional intensity. It perfectly encapsulates the somewhat over-dramatized but still very real emotions associated with departure and death without a single word being spoken — a rare feat for Röyksopp.
“The Inevitable End” ties all this up quite nicely with “Thank You,” where gratitude seems aimed at not only the fans but between Berge and Brundtland, a duo that has been busy at work perfecting the architectural details of their sound for over 15 years. One can only hope that they don’t scrap the unique melancholic sound and musical sensibility to become well-paid but indistinct producers of generic pop.
Reach the reporter at zachariah.webb@asu.edu or find him on Twitter @zachariahkaylar to talk about good music in insurance commercials.
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