Bleep

Of all the ground-breaking releases of the early 2000s, few come as seismic, and ironically underrated, as Norwegian duo Röyksopp’s 2001 debut,

Melody A.M. Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland’s natural talent for churning out hits pushed them to the top of the charts in Norway and all over Europe, exploding them into stardom seemingly out of nowhere. Yet Melody AM is the result of a decade of the two honing their synergy, tinkering with synths and samplers since their school days and embedding themselves within the communities of the famed Bergen Wave.

When their very first single ‘So Easy’ dropped in 1999, with its bass stabs and punchy rhythms, it was settled: “Watch these guys gain ubiquity,” as they recall THE FACE once said. Since then, several tracks from the album were tipped for channel idents and countless adverts (you’ll naturally have heard its lead single ‘Eple’), but there’s far more to Melody A.M. than its commercial success. Cloaked in billowing smoke clouds, the dreamy gauze of ‘So Easy’ is cut through by robotic growls and liquid record scratches, while ‘Eple’ twinkles and whistles with intricate synth-n-sample interplay, kaleidoscopic jangle guitars and sliding frets delayed to watery effect, all measured by a gloriously laid back downtempo rhythm.

They’re two handy introductions to the beautifully languid character of most of the album, with the likes of ‘Sparks’ containing smooth, subtle vocoder in between lo-fi vocals, and ‘She’s So’ head-nodding rhythm. But that’s only one side of the coin: ‘Poor Leno’ breaks from the trip hop mist with outgoing house, leading to the bouncy shadowplay of ‘A Higher Place’ tracing out a noir-ish B-movie atmosphere with crunchy, crackling volcanic beats, and the psychedelic vortex and cheeky self-reflexivity of ‘Röyksopp’s Night Out’.

Melody A.M. conjures images of an idyllic technicolour postcard fjordscape from one of the most exciting breakthrough acts to come out of Norway this century.