Röyksopp: "Shores of Easy"

After making a serious habit out of proving my expectations of an eventually diminished return completely wrong, Röyksopp have played me for a fool again. “Shores of Easy” is billed on the band’s website as “the perfect soundtrack to that borderline state between being awake and being asleep—the state where everything seems possible,” and as “not indicative of things to come.” Now, I at least know by this point that the downtempo legends are really the only ones with the skills necessary to effectively sidestep any sneaking suspicion of coy baiting when it comes to casually releasing a fourteen-minute ambient house monster that confidently rivals anything comparable this year and proceeding to yawn it off like Saturday morning cartoons—but I’ve got my critical tendencies. Still, considering what stands in my opinion as a pretty monolithic and genre-defining career, this probably really is just the languid Frankenstein result of another ho-hum virtuosic afternoon in Röyksoppland.

And I do actually have visions of Röyksopp’s dual CPUs Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland living in some sort of contented suburban banality, taking moments between sipping tea, adjusting pictures on the wall, vacuuming in aprons, and glancing pensively through kitchen windows to turn a knob here, press a switch there, or maybe offer a bellowed comment from room to room on the timing of this or that modulation. They stroll past each other through the hallways wearing yellow rubber gloves or flipping through trashy pop magazines, confirming their opinions on the opus blaring into every inch of the otherwise prim domicile with slow, sardonic headbangs or a paused rubbing of the chin.

But dammit if I just don’t want to believe it. It shouldn’t be so easy, but here these guys are living on the shores? Preposterous. And here we are, replete with these dense, soaring Orb-ish chords, distantly clanging windswept scaffolding, and Field-generating swish-rhythms. The whole thing really does come off as effortless and masterful. Of course any paranoid effort to use this as a prophetic touchstone was completely defeated before the tea was done steeping, so there goes any obsessive critical speculation. Halfway through “Shores” I decided to just give it up, and I couldn’t say much about what happened beyond that, because by the time that epic arpeggiated breakdown at nine minutes popped up, I felt like I was living it just as comfortably as the Röyksopp boys have been for a long time. Whatever “Shores” says or doesn’t say about what’s yet to come, I’m left with a big enough pile of high hopes and smooth vibes to be able to put my feet up indefinitely until it’s time to investigate.

:: Download mp3