PUNK GO FUNK! The insanely-hyped new album from Daft
Punk is finally here — but is it any good? DJ Mag USA review ‘Random Access Memories’...
IT’S FINALLY HERE. Eight years after their last proper album, if we discount the ‘Tron Legacy’ soundtrack, arrives Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’. David Bowie might have had the over 40s in a froth with his own return, but no other big comeback has generated as many column inches or as much digital hype as the French duo’s. When we were finally teased online with some scratchy video footage of their new tune ‘Get Lucky’, broadcast on a big screen at California’s Coachella festival, quickly followed by a more official video and several promo clips of interviews with the forthcoming album’s host of big name collaborators, social media, blogs, music sites and serious news portals were positively gushing with enthusiasm.
‘Get Lucky’, with its two massive guest stars Pharrell Williams (hip-hop and R&B innovator, erstwhile N.E.R.D member and one half of the Neptunes), and Nile Rodgers (guitarist, founder of disco legends Chic and producer extraordinaire to the megastars of pop), certainly made a big impression, and reactions were overwhelmingly positive. No big surprise. With a very cool video, depicting the DP robots playing drums and bass, Rodgers grinning on guitar and Pharrell singing his heart out, after several listens, it proved catchy as chlamydia and as more-ish as crack. And it was Daft Punk back to doing what they do best, right? Disco. But with one crucial difference: this was played live. The burning questions that loomed over the album, made more nagging by promotional materials insisting that Daft Punk wanted this whole record to be live, the work of a proper band, was — would they still be an electronic act? Still make house records? Or insist upon that tiresome, age-old tradition of making something ‘real’ and ‘live’, because electronic music somehow lacks ‘authenticity’ and ‘musicality’.
DJ Mag got lucky at the end of April and were granted an audience with the album. At that point, ‘Random Access Memories’ contents were a closely-guarded secret to the point of paranoia, the label terrified it would leak onto the internet. Now it’s finally about to spill into the public domain, what does it really sound like?
Well, our misgivings about its largely live band basis are proven true. Mostly, though not completely, ‘RAM’ is a guitar/bass/drum kit/analog synth affair; luckily, in places, it’s also a very funky one, with many of the tracks making the link between the filtered disco rhythms of Daft Punk’s ‘Homework’ and ‘Discovery’, and the original 1970s tunes that inspired them in the first place. Opening track ‘Give Life Back To Music’ (with its tellingly ‘organic’ title) is great, with scratchy funk
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djmag.com
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