Daft Punk Albums (5)
What The Critics Say
Timed to perfection, Daft Punk's second live album landed exactly ten years after the first, and provides a fitting complement to Alive 1997, easily the best live non-DJ electronica record ever released. While the original featured only a handful of tracks (but found them transformed and tweaked ad infinitum), Alive 2007 is packed with productions, most of them short and many of them getting a big crowd response (all recorded at one show in Paris in June of 2007). As on their first two classic full-lengths, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo display excellent crowd control, pacing the record well, spacing the hits, and building the mood like the good crowd-pleasers they are. (The visuals included in the regular and deluxe editions reveal quite the stage show as well.) It has the feel of a greatest-hits-live concert, but energized by Daft Punk's talents at weaving songs in and out of each other. Even songs from the comparatively desultory Human After All sound rejuvenated in context, with "Robot Rock" getting the show off to a rousing start. It may not be better or stronger than the original Alive 1997, but it's definitely harder and faster. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Daft Punk has always been one of dance music's most flexible -- and accessible -- acts, spanning the relentless pulse of Homework and the lush, sprawling Discovery with a distinctive wit and playfulness that made fans of electronic music diehards and indie rockers alike. Though the long-awaited Human After All retains that playfulness, it's the duo's simplest album, which oddly enough, makes it their most difficult to embrace at first. Human After All was made in six weeks, and sounds like it -- and not always in a good way: the quick-and-dirty recording process and limited palette of grainy synths, vocoders, and guitars do lend a stripped-down, spontaneous feel, but just as often, this minimal approach feels like it's supporting minimal ideas. Most of Human After All's tracks concentrate on one or two heavily repeated motifs, giving some of the tracks the feeling of demos copied and pasted to a full song length (even more uncharitably, you could say that they sound like parts of a Daft Punk beats-and-loops construction kit). "Steam Machine," for example, starts off strong with a low-slung, low-rent drum machine beat and aptly hissy whispering, but fails to do much over the course of five minutes. Repetition and simplicity, or at least a certain kind of innocence, have been at the heart of Daft Punk's music since the beginning, but this formula doesn't always work on Human After All; this is particularly true on the album's softer songs, "Make Love" and "Emotion," both of which are pretty and evocative, but never quite pack the emotional punch that they threaten to. And though Human After All's linear quality is superficially like the duo's more danceable work, many of the tracks are too slow to ignite the dancefloor (however, "Television Rules the Nation"'s robotic, "Smoke on the Water" meets "Iron Man" guitar riff nails the cleverly stupid vibe that doesn't always connect on the rest of the album). All of this makes the album something of an odd beast, and the baffled reactions of some fans -- some of whom suggested that Human After All was a fake album by the band made to foil digital piracy when it leaked several months before its official release date -- is understandable. Daft Punk aren't responsible for their listeners' expectations, but they release music so rarely that this low-res album with just ten songs (or nine, if you don't count the 19-second channel-surfing blip that is "On/Off") does, initially, feel like a disappointment. However, Human After All's best tracks do make the duo's somewhat confounding aesthetic choices work: "The Brainwasher"'s trippy opening and mischievous riffs have a real sense of tension and momentum; "Robot Rock" takes Discovery's guitar worship even further, forging it into cybernetic metal; and the irresistible "Technologic," with its catchy technobabble and cheap-and-cheerful disco beat, feels like the next evolution of tracks like "Teachers" and "Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger." Since the album is on a smaller scale than Daft Punk's previous albums, it's not surprising that its pleasures are smaller too. The way that the synth, guitar, and vocoder lines blur into mecha-orga unity on the oddly bittersweet title track, and the way that the schaffel beat on "Prime Time of Your Life" gradually overtakes the song, eventually speeding up and devouring it, may not change the way listeners think about music the way that Discovery or Homework did, but that doesn't make them any less enjoyable. Human After All ends up being just not-bad (a first for Daft Punk); that may be hard to accept for fans that demand nothing less than brilliance from them, but just because it isn't an instant classic doesn't mean that it's totally unworthy, either. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Alive 1997 reveals the French duo Daft Punk as one of the brightest entertainers in the occasionally stale world of album-based electronic dance. True, techno and house DJs can light up a crowd like few others, but the increasing artist slant of electronica often results in push-button programming and straight-from-DAT live performances, with most of the heavy lifting relegated to the lighting supervisor and effects computers. This brief glimpse at Daft Punk's live show circa 1997 (their major breakout year) is a tour de force of high-energy theatrics and flair. Aside from the pair of "WDPK" interludes, Alive 1997 includes only three tracks, but they're so radically different from their album versions that they're only barely familiar. The duo's biggest hit so far, "Da Funk," is stretched out to 16 minutes with a start-and-stop improvisation section that brings the crowd to a peak, while "Rollin' & Scratchin'" never looks back after breaking right on through the red-line. An energizing document, Alive 1997 is one of the few live records to approximate the excitement of the original live show. ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Four long years after their debut, Homework, Daft Punk returned with a second full-length, also packed with excellent productions and many of the obligatory nods to the duo's favorite stylistic speed bumps of the 1970s and '80s. Discovery is by no means the same record, though. Deserting the shrieking acid house hysteria of their early work, the album moves in the same smooth filtered disco circles as the European dance smashes ("Music Sounds Better With You" and "Gym Tonic") co-produced by DP's Thomas Bangalter during the group's long interim. If Homework was Daft Punk's Chicago house record, this is definitely the New York garage edition, with co-productions and vocals from Romanthony and Todd Edwards, two of the brightest figures based in New Jersey's fertile garage scene. Also in common with classic East Coast dance and '80s R&B, Discovery surprisingly focuses on songwriting and concise productions, though the pair's visions of bucolic pop on "Digital Love" and "Something About Us" are delivered by an androgynous, vocoderized frontman singing trite (though rather endearing) love lyrics. "One More Time," the irresistible album opener and first single, takes Bangalter's "Music Sounds Better With You" as a blueprint, blending sampled horns with some retro bass thump and the gorgeous, extroverted vocals of Romanthony going round and round with apparently endless tweakings. Though "Aerodynamic" and "Superheroes" have a bit of the driving acid minimalism associated with Homework, here Daft Punk is more taken with the glammier, poppier sound of Eurodisco and late R&B. Abusing their pitch-bend and vocoder effects as though they were going out of style (about 15 years too late, come to think of it), the duo loops nearly everything they can get their sequencers on -- divas, vocoders, synth-guitars, electric piano -- and conjures a sound worthy of bygone electro-pop technicians from Giorgio Moroder to Todd Rundgren to Steve Miller. Daft Punk are such stellar, meticulous producers that they make any sound work, even superficially dated ones like spastic early-'80s electro/R&B ("Short Circuit") or faux-orchestral synthesizer baroque ("Veridis Quo"). The only problems on Discovery arise when Daft Punk compensate for the album's lack of six-minute dance tracks by including a few too many half-developed productions like "High Life" and the ambient piece "Nightvision." One other crime is burying the highlight of the entire LP near the end. "Face to Face," a track with garage wunderkind Todd Edwards, twists his trademarked split-second samples and fully fragmented vision of garage into a dance-pop hit that could've easily stormed the charts in 1987. Daft Punk even manage a sense of humor about their own work, closing with a ten-minute track aptly titled "Too Long." ~ John Bush, All Music Guide
What The Critics Say
Daft Punk's full-length debut is a funk-house hailstorm, giving real form to a style of straight-ahead dance music not attempted since the early fusion days of on-the-one funk and dance-party disco. Thick, rumbling bass, vocoders, choppy breaks and beats, and a certain brash naiveté permeate the record from start to finish, giving it the edge of an almost certain classic. While a few fall flat, the best tracks make this one essential. ~ Sean Cooper, All Music Guide
