Despite its weak spots, Random Access Memories was Daft Punk's utterly seductive love letter to making albums
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Before we get to subjective matters of taste, let's pause to reflect on what Daft Punk objectively achieved this year. Consider the proposition: here are Thomas Bangalter and Guy de Homem-Christo, two French dance producers who, despite their gamechanging, EDM-spawning live shows, have never had a major global hit. Two men who don't have a frontman and haven't shown their faces since the 1990s. Two men whose reputation for electronic music, at a time when it has never been more lucrative, means they have zero external incentive to spend a king's ransom from their own pockets on high-end studios and scores of musicians. Two men who, flying in the face of every cultural trend, aspire to create a record that is an event on a scale one associates with the days of the pre-digital monoculture. The audacity is ridiculous. They are like Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog's film, hauling the steamer over the mountain. The steamer isn't meant to get over the mountain, and it is mad to try.
In interviews, Daft Punk have complained that the music industry, spooked by atomised audiences and falling revenues, played it safe – thus fearless, imaginative albums didn't sell, and those that did sell were neither fearless nor imaginative. Why not do both? They did. Propelled by the Trojan horse of Get Lucky and an advent-calendar marketing campaign that merged 1970s largesse with online mischief, Random Access Memories shifted 3m copies. The steamship made it over the mountain.
But is it any good? The first time I heard the album, in a neurotically secretive record company playback, I didn't quite know what to think. Some of it was clearly phenomenal; some of it was bizarre. Anyone who buys it on the strength of Get Lucky finds a deeply quixotic, personal, uncompromising, divisive piece of work that includes an extended interview with an Italian septuagenarian and a miniature pop opera written by the man whose CV includes Bugsy Malone and The Muppets Movie.
I know it's not flawless. I think Game of Love is a damp squib of a second track, Lose Yourself to Dance is too slow and the lyrics are either meaningless or sentimental in a peculiarly continental way. But Daft Punk's unwavering conviction has a way of melting my reservations. It's a proper album-lover's album, so diligently assembled that it encourages you to accept or reject the whole thing on its own terms. It is clearly the work of two unusual individuals who love these sounds, even the desperately unfashionable ones that have so far eluded revival even in this retro-maniac era – and their love makes me love them, too. I hear the romance of fandom in every note, and in the musicians they chose to work with. To me, it's not so much retro as it is the product of an alternate timeline, a fantastical vision of American popular culture between 1975 and 1985, dreamed up by two men who, in this life, were born a decade too late and several thousand miles too far east. As I played it over and over, it seduced me utterly.
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That's largely because it sounds extraordinary: three-dimensional, palatial. You feel like you can move around inside it and touch every surface. Every time I hear Get Lucky on the radio, I'm struck by how warm and deep it sounds compared to the shrill, redlined urgency of modern pop production. It's like bathing in gently heated champagne, or slipping into a bespoke outfit. Despite Nile Rodgers's commanding presence, it doesn't mimic the sound of Chic but shares that band's aspiration to make luxury items for mass consumption. Like a Chic record, or Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, it has the effortlessness that can only be achieved by months of painstaking effort. They sweat and strain so you don't have to. It also recalls Chic's lack of ego. Though sung by Pharrell Williams, it's about everyone listening to it; he's a vessel rather than a star.
As countless cover versions demonstrate, Get Lucky is an undeniable song, but the production works its real magic on more riskily eccentric material. The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones made a sharp observation: "The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of Random Access Memories repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I've ever heard … This record raises a radical question: does good music need to be good?"
When I'm listening to Game of Love I hear him loud and clear, but so much of Random Access Memories is beyond good – an Aladdin's cave of distinct pleasures. I love how Give Life Back to Music's disco fanfare sounds like Saturday Night Fever if it had been directed by Michael Mann; how Within makes me think of a chastened Wall-E regretting his first coke binge; how Instant Crush hones the new wave anomie of Phoenix and the Strokes to such perfection that their new albums shrivel by comparison; how Omar Hakim sets about his drum kit on Contact as if he's trying to launch a space shuttle single-handed; how Panda Bear sings Doing It Right like he's crooning an interplanetary lullaby; how the synthesiser in Giorgio by Moroder evokes an idealised, still out-of-reach future even now that great electronic records can be made on laptops in bedrooms; how Touch is both silly and profound, cheesy and overwhelming, and makes me feel, when the strings sweep in, like I'm taking ectasy at Disney World. Tangentially, I like the way that, having shelved their noisenik inclinations here, Daft Punk helped craft the annihilating electro-thug beats on Kanye West's Yeezus in their spare time. You want a buzzing cyborg racket? They can do that, too.
Random Access Memories is a colossal piece of work, but not in an overbearing "tremble at our genius, puny earthlings" way. Its size is generous, embracing and idealistic – an extraordinary leap of faith. Its success made pop music itself feel bigger and brighter when every other economic and technological trend was making it smaller, and it sent an inspiring message: if you build it, they will come.
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by Dorian Lynskey via Music: Electronic music | theguardian.com
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