WORDS Brian Carroll
Chances are, by now you’ve heard electronic two-piece Daft Punk’s catchy hit single, “Get Lucky” featuring guest vocals by Pharrell of N.E.R.D. fame. If so, you’ll know that that song is a blast, and speaks to the world in the same charged, nurturing tone for which the robot-themed dance group is known. It’s strong, and we’re all happy for the song’s success in these dark times. So how does the rest of the album compare?
Random Access Memories picks out and mashes up diverse moments of music from the last century, paying special attention to discarded styles from the late Seventies and early Eighties. It uses itself like a time capsule to tell a nostalgia-drenched, fleeting story. Deadpan disco is present. Also present is deadpan stadium-packing Seventies prog-rock and deadpan dentist’s office smooth jazz, these sounds peppered with short, neo-classical avant-garde interludes. While admittedly terrible sounding on paper, the record manages to convince thanks to the confident guitar work of Nile Rodgers of Chic on nearly every track. A noticeably strong suit this time around, Rodgers’s guitar is placed front and center to provide a busy, kinetic counterweight to the band’s vintage synthesizer riffs.
For the first time, Daft Punk has allowed their unique sound to be heard in a wide variety of matching and clashing live music environments. The album constantly offers up distinct production styles from other artists from the 70s, including Michael Jackson, Supertramp, Goblin, and Italian disco producer Giorgio Moroder. Only stopping to settle into something truly safe by modern standards once or twice, the album boldly and unironically delivers production styles other pop producers lack the confidence, gear, or know-how to touch. The choices in style can be fun to ponder, as random vintage throwbacks and classic rock references work in tandem to expand that Daft Punk sound, in a manner not too dissimilar from mashup artist Girl Talk.
Perhaps telling that the album’s low point seems to be the guest-vocalist-nearly-blew-it “Lose Yourself to Dance,” the duo sounds like they are no longer interested in making straightforward dance music, and would politely like it if we could let them occasionally be Journey, Isaac Hayes, Philip Glass, Judy Garland, DJ Shadow, Hall and Oates, and ABBA. But despite this generous wide range of influences, they also repeatedly promote the flavor of bland, no-name lite FM jazz sound you might overhear while getting your teeth drilled. This is often curiously balanced with the big drum sound of a firmly mulleted stadium prog-rock band, complete with a spandex leotards, smoke machines, and mountains of cocaine. That music like this is up for the same consideration as the more classy, theatrical offerings on display minutes later at any given point on the record says something to Daft Punk’s unique abilty to force their audience to see discarded ideas in new ways, then discard the ideas, too, before their credibility gets away from them.
The band’s signature reliance on the robotic vocal effect that musicians know as the Vocoder allows us to forgive their use of its wicked sister effect – autotuned vocals - on Julian Casablancas’s guest track. While tastefully done in Daft Punk’s hands, both effects sound a little tired, having been beaten to death by American Hip Hop producers for the past six years – a group of individuals who seem to be more in love with modern French Pop of late.
Even music snobs like Daft Punk, and the reason, besides that they freshen rooms, is that their music is about other people: their audiences. This time around, Daft Punk is about other people they like, and that’s cool, too. It’s interesting that they so openly reveal the large extent Italian disco, Moroder in particular, has had on their music by including an expensive-sounding tribute to the mustachioed grandfather of electronic dance music early on in the disc.
Probably the best parts of the album are the few sprinkled gasps of academic, noisy inspiration involving a concert orchestra, and on one track, an enormous choir. Centering around a sense of the epic and spacious, these sections lend the parade a welcome Stanley Kubrick vibe, yet are wiped from memory immediately by disposable pop beats and lie dormant until the next listen.
Designed as a love letter to the twentieth century, and how its sounds find a place in our subconscious to be stored, the album’s various reference points are capable of opening much baggage upon chance encounter with the right memory. It’s a romantic, up-til’-dawn sort of record, full of silly, fleeting fears, the sort of rock opera Don Johnson might imagine if reflecting back on his Miami Vice years in a drunken stupor at sunrise.
When all is said and done, RAM is a more all-encompassing affair than “Get Lucky” lets on.
High-concept and well-planned, it loses points when a scant couple of genre mashups don’t mesh. Despite their noted good intentions, Daft Punk overreaches occasionally here, particularly on the rock-based songs. The album contains at least one terrible moment, but you will be entertained by the band’s seemingly reckless commitment to their approach. As time with the record goes on, you’ll appreciate how carefully and cleverly the album was conceived, as a lonely bundle of meaningful excuses to explore and expand the Daft Punk sound by paying tribute to older artists.
It simultaneously saddens, livens, cools, and weirdens. Uniquely vintage by design, Random Access Memories points with longing nostalgia to the late 70s and early 80s, when pop music was quietly ignited by a cheery, Italian music producer in a golf shirt named Giorgio Moroder. His electronic recording techniques shook, doomed, and outlived disco, changing the course of pop for the next fourty years. His legacy is rather looming, and he’s not a household name. The record seeks to rectify that, but paints a convincing background portrait of the music’s surrounding era to give it context. Interesting to behold.
Random Access Memories is available for download on iTunes and Amazon.
Daft Punk action figures by Bandai are available for pre-order on Amazon.