Release Date: May 18, 2004
Genre(s): Electronic
Record label: Domino
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To Rococo Rot refined -- and perhaps perfected -- soft indie electronic pop with 1999's The Amateur View. What did that accomplishment leave them to do? Lesser groups would coast by on reputation, produce retreads of their most inspired moments, and wind up making records smaller in stature than that of their marginal imitators. It happens all the time, yet Hotel Morgen is no such example of this phenomenon.
To Rococo Rot always reappear on your radar at the most opportune moments. It’s timely that they should resurface with their new album just as electronica writhes in its final death throes, and it’s somehow important that the album re-invigorates everything that is good about said genre while dispensing with all of the frivolous, mawkish excesses. But I imagine that Lippok, Lippok and Schneider would have me sent to the principal’s office for such a claim.