Random Access Memories

In the electronica landscape of the 1990s, Daft Punk first came over as a novelty. Funny band name, funny sound, funny masks, and a funny (and incredibly fun) hit called “Da Funk,” found on their debut album, Homework. They’ve come a long way since, but the playfulness remains, and so does their ability to surprise. Every new step in their career, whether positive (the landmark Discovery, their life-altering pyramid live shows), negative (the inert Human After All, their forgettable score for Tron), or somewhere in between (the film Electroma) has been met initially with a collective sense of puzzlement: “Now what’s this all about?”

Random Access Memories, the fourth proper studio album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, continues the trend. But the differences between their first three albums and this one are vast. 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. 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. It’s all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared. 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. 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.

Daft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. 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. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. 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. 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. Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity.

Another way is to work with artists young and old who have inspired them. Rodgers pops up again on “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” and on both songs he’s joined by Pharrell on lead vocals. 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. But the French duo’s craftsmanship carries the day. Pharrell, despite being the biggest contemporary star on the album, sounds anonymous—his vocals are pretty much just functional. But even that is arguably in line with Daft Punk’s reverence. Disco, after all, was often a producer’s medium, and lead singers weren’t necessarily meant to be the the focus of attention. 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. “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.

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. “Game” and “Within” are downtempo, slightly jazzy robotic soul, delivered in the kind of gorgeous vocoder that Daft Punk have perfected. 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. All three tracks function well in the context of the record, throwing the tour-de-force “Giorgio by Moroder” into sharp relief.

“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”. Moroder’s only contribution to the song is an interview that offers a thumbnail history of his life as a musician, one that recounts how how he heard the sequenced Moog as the future of music (see “I Feel Love”). The construction of “Giorgio by Moroder” is masterful, moving from easygoing beats to a for-the-ages, chill-inducing synth line, to orchestral crashes, to a brilliantly goofy guitar solo. It’s a fitting tribute to Moroder’s spirit and legacy.

RAM’s best songs come in its second half, another clue that it’s meant to be heard in full. It builds as it goes. “Touch”, the record’s literal centerpiece, is where things start to get interesting. It’s telling that the songs featuring the two oldest and deepest influences on the record—Moroder and Paul Williams—are the most over-the-top. (Williams’ role in the 1974 cult film Phantom of the Paradise became an early obsession for Daft Punk.) These pocket symphonies allows the duo to take their concerns to the furthest reaches of ambition—and good taste. “Touch” packs in a Cluster-fied spacey intro, some showtune balladry, a 4/4 disco section complete with swing music trills, and a sky-scraping choir, all in service of a basic lyrical idea: love is the answer and you’ve got to hold on. It’s strange, disorienting, and emotionally powerful, with a silliness that doesn’t undercut the deep feelings in the least. It encapsulates what makes Daft Punk such an enduring proposition: their relationship to cool. Their vulnerability comes from embracing cheese while also understanding the humor and playfulness in it, holding all these ideas in mind at once.

This quality is also heard in “Fragments of Time”, featuring lead vocals by legendary house DJ Todd Edwards. The laid-back melody embodies another often disparaged musical moment: ’70s singer-songwriter excess that East Coast critics liked to write off as the sound of El Lay—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Michael McDonald. Conveying the openness and innocence that marked pop radio as the ’70s ended, “Fragments of Time” sounds something like a sequel to Discovery’s “Digital Love.” Contrasting “Digital Love” and “Fragments of Time” also raises an interesting paradox: though everything about RAM, from the session musicians to the guests to the means of production, is meant to sound more “human,” the album at points sounds more sterile, almost too perfect. To my ears, this quality isn’t necessarily to its detriment, as much of its appeal ultimately comes from its surface beauty, the sheer gorgeousness of the overall sound. But I suspect this feeling is at the root of why, judging from early reviews, some listeners were underwhelmed.

The continual churn of the internet, experience tells us, favors quick connections, conveniences, ephemeral pleasures. But there are areas of culture popping up that seek to slow down, focus on details, and wallow in the kinds of media that it still takes money to create. This is the space that Daft Punk seek to occupy, which in and of itself can be seen as problematic. For those who embrace the more egalitarian approach to music production created by access to cheap tools and cheap distribution, Daft Punk’s mind-bogglingly lush record scans as elitist, possibly even dismissive of the creativity that is happening on a smaller scale.

To really understand where they’re coming from here, you have to go back to the height of the album era, which was really just a blip in pop music history. Three things made it different: 1) it was the time just before MTV; 2) it was the time just before the CD; 3) it was the time just before the Walkman. All three hit around the dawn of the ’80s and had a profound influence on how recorded music was experienced. MTV, in addition to foregrounding the visual presentation of artists, returned music to a singles-focused realm. The CD did its part too, making skipping ahead so easy and allowing for the listener to jump around at will. (It also made artwork less important and introduced the idea of records as “data.”) And the Walkman’s convenience opened up new spaces for listening while decreasing sound quality, a trade-off that has driven the technology behind popular music consumption ever since.

So RAM is best appreciated as a counter to these trends. It’s not that “all music should be this” but that “some music could be this.” By the time you make it to the album’s astonishing final stretch, it’s hard not to think that Daft Punk have succeeded at what they set out to do. The arrangements on “Beyond” and “Motherboard” are breathtaking, and Panda Bear, after many so-so collaborations, aces his vocal turn on “Doin’ It Right,” a terrifically uplifting bit of electro-pop.

And then it ends with “Contact”: It’s the most old-school Daft Punk song here, and it’s also the only one based on a sample, pulling its main riff from a 1981 song by the Australian band the Sherbs. Daft Punk and collaborator DJ Falcon first used “Contact” in a DJ mix in 2002, and now it finds its way on an album about time and memory in 2013. You get a feeling of time collapsing with it, seeing where Daft Punk have been and where they could go. “Contact” will likely close some future live multimedia extravaganza, and people will go insane, and they will return to this album with new ears. You never know, but my guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now. You’ll forget the YouTube interviews with the collaborators, you’ll forget the day they announced the suits, you’ll forget the day the “Get Lucky” snippet leaked, you’ll forget every rumor, you’ll forget the SNL commercials. But the record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

$40 at Rough Trade

$32 at Amazon

$35 at Target