News / / 15.05.13

DAFT PUNK

RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES (Columbia)

15/20

 

This isn’t necessarily the album we were expecting. After the ebullient, emphatic tease of Get Lucky, the kind of song that sounds as good on a crappy shower radio as it would at a wedding or a club, it felt like we were maybe, hopefully, being primed for a contemporary take on Discovery. What we get, over the course of 74 minutes, is … not quite that.

Give Life Back to Music, despite sounding like the Whitest Boy Alive, is a gorgeous opener; the vocoders – slathered all over the album, sprinkled with a touch of fuzz, trailing and tailing away ever so slightly – effortlessly glide over Nile Rodgers’ typically precise rhythm guitar, Easy Lover-style breakdowns abound, and a simple descending piano chord sequences anchors the whole thing. OK, you say to yourself, maybe we have got a disco album here. Indeed, it’s the nominally ‘disco’ tracks that work best, with the Pharrell and Rodgers assisted Lose Yourself to Dance being the potential highpoint. The repetition of the title over another phenomenal Rodgers groove – there’s no one who can match that lightness of touch with a deft sense of heft, anchoring a track entirely but simultaneously never showing off – and crisp handclaps, we’re reminded that while the idea of disco as a zone of transcendence is nothing new, in the right hands, at the right time, it’s the most seductive thing in the world.

After the machinistic misfire of Human After All it’s a pleasure to be relocated somewhere in the world of very real, very human emotion. There’s a sense of paradoxically intimate distance running through RAM: the innate sadness of The Game of Love is amplified by the way vocoders render the human voice as something ‘other’, the way they can, when used properly, bring a neon-signs-and-endless-rain end-of-the-night-and-the-attendant-deep-melancholy to platitudes (“I just wanted you to stay” they repeat into eternity as electric pianos tinkle in half-time) that, if expressed regularly, would melt into nothingness. It’s Digital Love transmuted from mere song title to complete sonic aesthetic.

There are, sadly, two big, big misfires on here. The intro to Giorgio by Moroder is great; the moment the great man introduces the click track is great, the intonation of “My name is Giovanni Giorgio, but everybody calls me … Giorgio” is a guaranteed neck-hair-raiser, and the abrasive, snaking, arpeggiated synth melody is mindblowing. But the entirety of the song’s second half induces a feeling of sheer and genuine embarrassment: strings try to soar over lumpen live drum breakbeats, guitars start to wail and the whole thing suddenly sounds like a Propellerheads track. Rather than the pleasurable retromania that permeates much of the album, it just sounds dated, naff. Those retro tendencies include touches of yacht rock here (especially on the breezy, sunblushed Fragments of Time with a charmingly unprocessed Todd Edwards on vocals), Balearic incantations there (Motherboard sounding like the kind of murky weirdness that DJ Harvey’d pitch down a bit and blow beardy minds with, all deep, deep swirls and percussive shuffles, crystalline melodies dripping over running water) and a bit of 80s synth-pop thrown in for good measure (a confusingly smoothed-out Julian Casablancas turns up on the yearning night-drive cruise of Instant Crush, one of the record’s highlights) Giorgio by Moroder is too overblown to be taken seriously, not overblown enough to be played off as a joke. Then there’s Touch, one of their collaborations with Paul Williams. Touch is just … awful. Sappy, overripe lyrical sentimentality (‘Touch, sweet touch/You’ve given me too much to feel/Sweet touch/You’ve almost convinced me I’m real’) paired with the kind of delivery and accompaniment that brings cruise ship theatricality to mind. It plods, it meanders, it’s chintzy and naff, it’s curdled and rank. It sucks the life out of the room.

Things take a turn for the better with the aforementioned Fragments of Time, and even the Panda Bear assisted Doin’ it Right is a pleasant enough detour down a half-speed electro avenue, even if PB sticks to his normal plaintive wail schtick. The closer, Contact – a collaborative effort with Thomas Bangalter’s former creative partner DJ Falcon –  is, and we admit this is tenuous, comparable to the way m b v ended. Its screaming feedback is reminiscent of the way that album’s Wonder 2 bled out into undulated sheets of plane-taking-off white noise.

We didn’t get another Homework. We didn’t get another Discovery. We didn’t get twelve variations of Get Lucky. What we did get, then, is an album that’s nearly as great as we wanted to be, an album that’s best points are better than nearly anything released this year so far, an album that’s going to sell millions of copies and introduce a lot of people to sounds and styles they’ve probably not explored before, an album that’s ambitious and grandiose, and, in a strange way, exactly what we expected. You put it on and it sounds like Daft Punk. Sometimes there’s nothing more you could ask for.

 

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Words: Josh Baines

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