Even die-hard Röyksopp fans can be forgiven for some ambivalence: the pleasure of last year’s Junior still might not be enough to erase the dissonant memory of The Understanding, whose solid individual tracks and ready-made dance hits never really cohered into a record – the work of a group that, competent on several registers, couldn’t pick one. Those warring personalities now each have a home: last year’s pulsing, excited Junior is now followed – complemented – by Senior, a more mellow and more soaring take on the same themes. It’s a resounding success.
To keep releasing the same recording session might be a recipe for stagnation (see: Ratatat, LP4). But Junior and Senior show a remarkable self-awareness by Röyksopp of their own strengths – not to mention reassuring faith in The Album as a form – and could really be two sides of the same record. “Tricky Two,” which remixes the same underlying melody as the former album’s “Tricky” to more effective and serene ends, suggests nothing so much as an alternate reality.
No vocals disrupt the masterful instrumentation on Senior, and it’s at its strongest when the synthesizers retreat into atmospheric background, as in “Senior Living,” where a lonely, echoing guitar follows what sounds like an ancient phonograph in an empty house. The sound of antique audio, a nod to the music’s undeniable digital origins, give an edge to compelling melody and haunting instrumentation. Meanwhile noise and distortion augment perfectly the ambiguous pulse of “The Drug.”
“Senior Living”‘s opening gramophone hiss is a smooth transition from the minute or so of rain that ends the previous track (“The Alcoholic”). Field recordings from the 21st century: the album opens (“And the forest begins to sing”) with the crackling hiss of ghosts in a machine, an open phone line from early William Gibson, then is punctuated by a voice drowned in interference (“The Fear”), before its closing rumination (“A long, long way”) is swallowed in radio static and distant rumblings. Beneath sensuous synthetic melodies, something deeper still moves.
