“Giorgio” is a stunning piece of pop-prog that seems partly drawn from the groundbreaking producer’s experiments in long-form, epic disco, like his side-long version of “Knights in White Satin”. All three tracks function well in the context of the record, throwing the tour-de-force “Giorgio by Moroder” into sharp relief. Musically, “Instant Crush” sounds a lot like a great song by Daft Punk’s pals Phoenix, and the processed lead vocal from the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas holds a simple tune that’s catchier than anything he or his main band have managed in a while. “Game” and “Within” are downtempo, slightly jazzy robotic soul, delivered in the kind of gorgeous vocoder that Daft Punk have perfected. Other songs in the record’s first half-“The Game of Love,” “Within,” and “Instant Crush”-don’t make a huge impression initially but are best understood as part of a broader whole. “Lose Yourself to Dance,” on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach. So it comes back to songwriting and production: How strong is the groove, how memorable are the hooks? “Get Lucky,” a deserved hit, works on both counts. Disco, after all, was often a producer’s medium, and lead singers weren’t necessarily meant to be the the focus of attention. ![]() But even that is arguably in line with Daft Punk’s reverence. Pharrell, despite being the biggest contemporary star on the album, sounds anonymous-his vocals are pretty much just functional. But the French duo’s craftsmanship carries the day. These two songs basically find Daft Punk attempting to make their version of a Chic song, which, in itself, is not a particularly notable goal. Rodgers pops up again on “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” and on both songs he’s joined by Pharrell on lead vocals. Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity.Īnother way is to work with artists young and old who have inspired them. If people still went into stereo shops and bought stereos regularly, like they did during the era Daft Punk draw from, this record, with its meticulously recorded analog sound, would be an album to test out a potential system, right up there with Steely Dan’s Aja and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. In a strictly technical sense, as far as capturing instruments on tape and mixing them so they are individually identifiable but still serve the arrangements, RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. You can’t have an argument without a thesis, and they start the album with one called “Give Life Back to Music.” The song’s opening rush brings to mind “old” Daft Punk, but then come percussive guitar strums courtesy of Nile Rodgers followed by orchestral surges. Most of all, they wanted to create an album-album, a series of songs that could take the listener on a trip, the way LPs were supposedly experienced in another time.ĭaft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. For RAM, Daft Punk recorded in the best studios, they used the best musicians, they added choirs and orchestras when they felt like it, and they almost completely avoided samples, which had been central to most of their biggest songs. It’s all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared. So we get a mix of disco, soft rock, and prog-pop, along with some Broadway-style pop bombast and even a few pinches of their squelching stadium-dance aesthetic. RAM finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s. But the differences between their first three albums and this one are vast. ![]() Random Access Memories, the fourth proper studio album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, continues the trend.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |