Peter de Vries, Staff Contributor
When an artist puts out an album called Junior and then follows it with another called Senior, you could be forgiven for fearing the worst.
Such an obvious and deliberate thematic leap from youth to old age could scare a listener into thinking that the prior album’s catchy, upbeat electronica will be replaced by sagging melodies, leaden beats and an oppressively melodramatic self-importance. Worse yet, many aging bands are unwittingly sinking into self-parody by splattering the internet, radio, and TV with undigested drek born from their arthritic creative processes.
Unlike some of Röyksopp’s earlier material, Senior’s songs take time to percolate, revealing their rewards slowly over multiple listens. Luckily, Senior almost never makes you feel like you’re aging during this process. The album’s pace is more languid than its predecessors’ and its theme more severe, but neither of these points is ultimately cumbersome.
“Tricky Two,” an obvious foil to Junior’s “Tricky Tricky,” starts Senior off with some surprisingly upbeat drum loops and gripping melodies before dissolving into an anxious mess of sustained synthesizers.
“Senior Living” sounds like it could be from Fever Ray’s catalogue if it weren’t for the moody guitar parts, which drift the track along in a peaceful but oddly melancholic haze. Next, “The Drug” has the kind of groove and discordant sound blips that might have landed it on the Trainspotting soundtrack had it been released in the 1990s.
A subtle feeling of anxiety permeates the entire album, but it shifts closer to paranoia towards the end with “The Fear.” After 15 seconds of appropriately spooky synth sounds open the track, the intensity picks up as Röyksopp’s computerized melancholy floods your ears with a sense of hopelessness that’s somehow catchy and oddly fulfilling.
Most impressively, Röyksopp manage to sustain this fulfilling feeling throughout the album. With Senior, they have successfully dodged the trappings of pretension that so many other artists would’ve fallen prey to, which easily puts them a few notches above most of their fiercest competitors.
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