Let's Get It On... with Royksopp's The Understanding
Written: Jul 15 '05 (Updated Jul 15 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: An hour of post- (or pre-) coital bliss.
Cons: May be too blatantly pop for purists.
The Bottom Line: In which the author's been really, really tryin', baby, to hold back these feelings for so long, and if you feel like I feel, come on, come on, come on...
plorentz's Full Review: The Understanding by Royksopp
The second album by Norwegian electronic duo Royksopp, entitled The Understanding, begins with a moonlight sonata, a simple and stately piano figure, a prelude to a kiss, and probably more. It feels obvious and familiar, but it also feels wonderful, like a late-night, just-past-dinner conversation with someone you’ve known for years, someone you’ve just re-discovered, under the tinkly white lights of a chandelier in a room full of ornate mahogany. The “crystal” on that chandelier might be something closer to glass, and the “mahogany” is clearly a veneer, but it doesn’t really matter, because there’s a tacit agreement hovering in the space between the two of you and someone’s gonna get lucky tonight.
Working within a genre with a reputation for brazen excess, aggressively hallucinogenic noises, volcanic beats and the occasional banshee vocal, Royksopp dazzled the few people still paying attention to electronica in 2001 with the inviting warmth, cerebral cool and bubbling understatement of their debut album Melody A.M.. Four years on, The Understanding boasts all of its predecessors’ many virtues, only tempered with a healthy dose of vice. If Melody A.M. was merely supernaturally attractive, The Understanding is also undeniably sexy, but with a sophistication, a classicist sheen to it that might ingratiate itself with an audience far broader than an “electronica” label might suggest.
The Understanding is more of-this-planet, of-this-time-and-place than Royksopp have ever gotten, but their canvas has also broadened, so that straightforward pop songs like "49 Percent”, which might have found a home on any Craig David or George Michael record (though certainly not Royksopp's last CD), are juxtaposed with instrumentals like “Sombre Detune” and “Alpha Male” - little brightly colored bits of sci-fi ear candy, like excerpts from a score for an artsy vintage documentary about life in the anonymous steely cold of a new age European metropolis – Le Corbusier’s wildest architectural fantasies come to brilliant life, a place where Giorgio Moroder is president of everything and everyone’s eyelashes glitter ambrosially.
“Circuit Breaker” is a breathless soliloquy from the throes of a seduction. And with its nostalgic chord progessions and 70s AM radio melody, “Beautiful Day Without You” is like an early morning breeze blowing through a curtained window when you’re still in bed. Meanwhile, lead single “Only This Moment” is ripply and oceanic and light-headed, a delicious post-coital buzz. All these songs owe a heavy debt to latter-day Underworld, but who cares about that sort of thing when every last synapse is lit up like Las Vegas with sex? Still, to their credit, Royksopp never get crass, neither musically nor lyrically. These songs always feel like they’re holding just a little something-something back, like a tease, leaving the best parts up to the imagination.
Equal parts chill out, make out and break out, The Understanding will, no doubt, offend the band’s more purist base with its apparent embrace of a more standard Eurodisco aesthetic. But if all Eurodisco was this sleek, this sensual, this tantalizingly nuanced and under-the-sheets cozy, then “Eurodisco” wouldn’t be the dirty word it is. Come hither.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"The Understanding" by Royksopp
Wall of Sound / Labels / Astralwerks Records
Released 7/12/05
Produced by Royksopp
58 min.
SONGS: Triumphant - Only This Moment - 49 Percent - Sombres Detune - Follow My Ruin - Beautiful Day Without You - What Else is There? - Circuit Breaker - Alpha Male - Someone Like Me - Dead to the World - Tristesse Globale
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