For more than a decade, To Rococo Rot have been peddling their particular brand of pensive instrumental-electronica. Curiously, given their substantial back catalogue, you couldn’t say these have been years of great adventure for the Berlin act. Yes, certain albums have been more figurative, others more abstract, but any changes have been subtle rather than radical and they’ve never drawn outside the lines of their musical comfort zone.
So it is with Speculation, another record that’s easy to admire, but hard to love. This is an album in the old-school sense – a mood-piece on which each track interlocks with the next like the parts of a jigsaw. The musicianship of Stefan Schneider and brothers Robert and Ronald Lippok is predictably superb, the trio chiselling vast grooves from guitar, drums, keys and electronics. However, technical proficiency is not enough. Their songs should conjure a sense of infinite wonder, instead the likes of ‘Away’ and ‘Ships’ suggest a vast emptiness. Even the addition of Faust’s Jochen Irmler – on organ – fails to evolve anything worthwhile from the primordial sludge of ‘Fridays’.
Only occasionally – through the nimble percussion of ‘Seele’ and vital krautrock pulse and throb of ‘Bells’ – do they offer anything to thaw that intergalactic coldness. Rather than “celebrate uncertainty”, Speculation is an album undermined by constant tinkering, as instruments and ideas rotate ad nauseum. By the close you’ll be pleading, ‘stop the merry-go-round, I want to get off’.