Röyksopp, The Inevitable End – review

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There is a moment on the bus route from Kilkenny to Dublin when you reach Athy and die of terminal boredom. The same you might say about Röyksopp’s final album, The Inevitable End, or the musical version of counting down the kilometres on a long journey.

To say that this is a bad record is to give it an emotion, but The Inevitable End is merely a tedious regurgitation of anything that was hip last year. Röyksopp are those friends who believe they are the only people on the planet to have heard Brian Eno or the Drive soundtrack.

That last part is probably being generous. This is the complete collection of songs rejected by Zane Lowe for Drive: Rescored, or the meandering album of Air covers done by Owl City that nobody wanted.

For every glimmer of hope, such as on the marvellous Running to the Sea, there are five counter-productive romps across the impotent fields of irrelevance, which suggest that these “mavericks” of electronica only discovered arpeggios, and vocoders two weeks into their last recording session.

Unfortunately, as a group capable, I believe, of writing a fine swansong, all there is to see here are two artists that quit painting landscapes to doodle dicks on a napkin. It is barely worth streaming. Please, do not pay for this, unless you run out of barbiturates, because it probably works as a substitute for sleeping pills.

And guess what? You couldn’t develop an addiction to it, even if you tried.

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