Records of the Week

TO ROCOCO ROT ON MYSPACE / TO ROCOCO ROT ON DOMINO RECORDS WEB SITE

There’s a certain splendor to be found in hypothesizing without ever coming to any sort of conclusion, and Berlin trio To Rococo Rot seem to know this quite well. With a slight twist in wording, this could be seen as an insult, that there’s a whole lot of guesswork with no follow through, but that quite frankly brings us back to the whole journey-not-the-destination argument just as easily. Dabbling all over the map, from post-rock to free jazz and smooth electronic mayhem, the band’s seventh proper LP admittedly finds itself thinking and pondering more than racing to a finish line or climaxing to a tragic end, but that’s exactly the point. With the aesthetic of a true rock group and the ethic of ambient composition, TRR are true masters of that which brings everyone in the instrumental game together: speechless meditation. It may twitch here and there with IDM anxiety or it may sweat with the vim and vigor of an earthy pagan discotheque, but throughout it all is something universal, something that just sits with you as you listen and doesn’t exactly incite movement or worry. And yet, it doesn’t sit still either. It’s the kind of meditation you dream of as a child that dances playfully in your head and never bores. It’s full of wonder and vitality, and yet washes a kind of calm over you that feels completely new and refreshing. The album title might be Speculation, which fits all this talk about actively using one’s head, but there is indeed no need to speculate about whether the expanse of this record is a void or a catalyst. It most assuredly is the most friendly wallop of a instrumental listen you’ll hear all year.