[REQUEST] Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

Random Access Memories

Best song: Within

Worst song: Touch

Overall grade: 3

Daft Punk are not a punk band, but I’m not going to comment on the first half of their name.

For anyone who doesn’t know what Daft Punk sound like, they’re not really known for music that’s actually made by humans. Most of their output consists of computer-programmed, machine-generated beats, thumps and wubs. For this reason, and others which I will discuss later in my review, I’ve been known to call them ‘Kraftwerk for boring people’. This new album is generally considered to tone down these elements a lot more and include a lot of actual people, but sometimes I can’t see that, and at other times I can see it, but don’t really think it’s a good thing.

I don’t have anything against electronic music, but while listening to this I find myself craving those rare bursts of real instrumentation, whether good – like that all too brief electric guitar solo that appears on ‘Instant Crush’ – or bad – like absolutely everything on ‘Touch’, because at least they make me feel something. My feelings towards the first three songs are identical. Variously, they blend electronica and house with funk, disco, dubstep, and techno, and each time a song begins I think to myself, ‘Hey, this is pretty interesting!’ This lasts for an average of twenty seconds before I start to get bored, and after maybe a minute, I realise that the interesting parts are just going to be dragged out and repeated to eternity. It’s not soothing or atmospheric enough to be background music but it’s far too repetitive to be actually entertaining. On the third track, ‘Giorgio by Moroder’, we’re also treated to a length monologue by famous producer Giorgio Moroder himself on his life, and that’s something that definitely does not hold up to repeated listens. But at least he pronounces ‘Moog’ right.

There is one song that I feel like I can freely compliment. ‘Within’ is based around a melody played on a real piano that’s actually quite beautiful and the weirdly hypnotic vocals play around with pitch in an interesting way. The lonely confusion of the song’s narrator is demonstrated well by the understated juxtaposition of the robotic and the human. I don’t know how they managed it, but the pair should be very proud of this one: it’s genuinely touching. It may be sung by a guy who wears a helmet whenever he goes out into a public place, but it makes me believe that he actually feels something inside, and I don’t get that anywhere else on the record.

The band were relatively unknown (compared to now) before they had a massive hit single, ‘Get Lucky’, which was played on every radio station, at every party, and in every shop over the summer. The first time this happened, I heard the song. The second time, I recognised it, and realised that it wasn’t a welcome reprise. As I tend to tune out songs I don’t like, it took a while before I realised just how huge it had become… but the song really had been stalking us all for several months now. Imagine my horror when I was commissioned to write this and discovered that the album version was not the four minute radio edit, but six full minutes (the extra two just consist of the line ‘We’re up all night to get lucky’ on repeat). On a similar note, second single ‘Lose Yourself To Dance’ follows the same sort of pattern, and sounds like what would happen if Primal Scream sold out and tried to score a Top 10 hit. I blame Pharrell Williams for the unpleasantly sexualised direction these two songs take – he’s a credited songwriter on both, but no other tracks.

I’m very confused by ‘Touch’. It’s so ridiculously dramatic that it may or may not be intended as a joke. If it is one, I don’t find it very funny. It tries to do many things, like create a creepy atmosphere at the beginning, move into a more serious, personal, evocative middle and then have a big, sweeping climax to close, complete with angelic female choir. Now, that’s a fair enough framework for an ‘epic’ song to follow, but each element is turned up to eleven in its extremity, and the overall effect causes the song to be almost physically repulsive. The lyrics are awful, too, and often pretty hard to ignore.

I could make a similar criticism about the opening to ‘Beyond’. Remember how in some of my prog reviews I argue that being overblown or bombastic isn’t necessarily a bad quality in music? Well, it certainly can be a bad quality, and this is a prime example. Nothing in the rest of the song justifies the over the top approach of the beginning, making it a pretty big letdown. In fact, I’d argue that this is the three-quarter mark slump, an old trap that Daft Punk have let themselves fall into. I mean, I can’t even work out where ‘Beyond’ ends and ‘Motherboard’ begins, and ‘Fragments of Time’ is another one that just doesn’t stay with me, returning to my point that some of this stuff doesn’t make me feel anything except empty.

‘Doin’ it Right’ picks things up a little bit towards the end. It’s probably the only track where vocals are the primary instrument, and it features a surprising guest musician in Panda Bear (of Animal Collective – I love them!) who delivers a characteristically bizarre and schizophrenic performance, and I actually like the way this works, set against the rhythmic and consistent beats of our helmet-clad band. Then, we close things off (finally – this is one CD, but it’s the length of a double album) with ‘Contact’, a space rock themed instrumental that actually goes somewhere for once and isn’t bad per se, but doesn’t need to be so long – the last minute and a half, for a start, are completely unnecessary.

I’m actually pretty glad I’ve listened to this album all the way through. As one of these things that delights all three of a mainstream audience, serious music fans and professional rock critics, it was a pretty big gap in my knowledge for a few months. That said, I’ve yet to understand all the fuss.

The title’s weird, too. There’s nothing random about this music. It’s perfectly scripted, every time interval precise to the nearest millisecond, and the only thing shinier than their production is their helmets. But in most cases, it’s all show. No matter how beautiful it is on the outside, when there’s no life beneath the surface, I can’t like this album.