hi there, i´ve listened to the new album 7 to 10 times now (´bought it yesterday and paid ridiculous 9,99 Euros for it) and i must say that "tour de france soundtracks" is quite boring. the album´s name says what you have to expect. the 12 new pieces of music are more tracks than songs. the problem is that they are somewhere between song-structure and track-structure without hitting the point. yes, the pieces are very well elaborated, minimal and crystal clear sounding, but i fear that kraftwerk of nowadays are the "knobtwisters" that they were called back in the 70ies when they were a fantastic (techno-)pop band, who wrote great hits. if i listen to the older albums there are plenty of nice tunes that you can sing along, but these tunes are missing on "tdf st". the predominant aspects of the album are perfect timed effects and filters and a state of the art production technique, but imo it´s produced to death. i dunno if this is because karl and wolfgang left the band and nowadays kraftwerk are not able to write good melodies any more, or because ralf and florian want to approach the club and dancefloor-scene and give away the pop-band image. nevertheless the melodies on "tdf st" are silly and boring, and this is the reason why the whole album is. this is no techno, this is no pop; no revolutionary new sounds, no hits, this is ordinary electronica. i´m sorry that i feel like that but the 17 years waiting made me nuts. stay tuned NUC2001