"Only this moment (Holds us together)"

I tend to think of Röyksopp as a very frustrating group. Their first album, Melody A.M., contained some of the most breathtaking music I've ever heard. It also contained a lot of bland, middle-of-the-road electropop. Listening to that album, I felt like they were on the verge of something unbelievable, and I couldn't help but wonder what could have been if they'd somehow made an entire album of music as transcendantly beautiful as "Eple," "In Space," and "Sparks." At their best, they were in that wonderful world occupied by Boards of Canada and pretty much nobody else, a world of music that sounds like it was made by people dropped in from a different planet of indescribable beauty. At their worst, they were cringe-inducing breakbeat pushing a sound that had peaked a decade before their time.

So with that in mind, I guess it should come as no surprise that their new album, The Understanding, is similarly frustrating. This one is definitely inferior to its predecessor. While there are no moments that make me drop my jaw and consider forsaking all other music in the world today, there are certainly moments that make me want to crank up the speakers and lose myself. But this simply isn't enough! These guys could have been huge! They could have made something along the lines of Music Has the Right to Children! Plain and simple, they settled for less, and worse, it took them four years to do it, filling in the intervening time period with a slew of unsatisfying remixes*.

As on their debut album, there are tracks that I'll probably skip past after the "getting-to-know-you" period finishes. "49 Percent" is particularly embarrassing, as is "Alpha Male," which is not only about four minutes too long (at 8:11), but also sounds a lot like the music on the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic-themed game I used to own for Sega Genesis (it's not just the Scandinavian theme, it really does sound like it).

Even the best moments sound like countless other tracks. Is anybody still blown away by the swirling bips and boops that mark "Only This Moment"? How about the shuffling disco breakbeat in "Circuit Breaker"? Those are both good tunes (particularly the latter), but nothing I haven't heard countless times before. Also in the "yeah it's nice, BUT..." category is the closing track, "Tristesse Globale," which is about as professional as a blatant ripoff of Brian Eno's ambient work has ever been (save maybe some of Radiohead's Kid A stuff, which, by the way, I still love). It's a nice change of pace to hear them ape a sound that peaked 30 years ago, as opposed to 10 or 15 years ago, but still... I wish they'd go back to the drawing board and give me some more of that outer-space, genre-defying instrumental bliss.

*The term "unsatisfying remix" almost seems redundant. I could probably count on one hand the number of remixes that I've liked. Not surprisingly, Boards of Canada account for a couple (their remix of Beck's "Broken Drum" is infinitely better than the original), but even those are frustrating because I'd rather them spend their time recording original music.