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.
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