Best track on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

Guitar!

get lucky. could pretend it's not but the rest of the album is ornamental 'nydangle by comparison IMO.

not that other songs don't have their moments, but y'know, it's the track you wait for when you listen to it.

contact

stop spreading lies about me dog latin

I've only bothered listening to it once, Giorgio is the only track that made much of an impression apart from the big singles.

Instant Crush

Just put this on a couple days ago for the first time in a while and it holds up. Went for "Lose Yourself to Dance" over "Doin' It Right", "Get Lucky", "Fragments of Time".

Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one.

Yeah it's easily 'get lucky'. I like 'instant crush', 'doin it right' and 'lose yourself to dance' a fair bit but I just never feel compelled to go back to this.

I'm not entirely sure what the general consensus on this record is around here--or if there even is one, as plenty seem to like it a lot and plenty more expressed disappointment in the original discussions on it--but I ran out of patience with it sometime around August.

The obvious answer is Doin it Right. Moroder is skippable garbage wtf w you people

The obvious answer is Touch wth is wrong with everyone

about half of this is a really solid Trans Am record imo

My Fave is Giorgio.

Lucky vs Crush vs Doing it right
surprised people seem to have lost interest in this one - it's one of the CDs that always linger in my car and it still brings so much pleasure whenever I put it on
Giorgio and Contact are the only tow I generally skip

'Giorgio By Moroder' just ahead of 'Contact'.

"Fragments of Time", but I still like this record as a whole; slightly disappointing to see that interest has generally faded away.

Not sure it's people losing interest so much as people having run out of new things to say.

love "Horizon" and p much loathe the album proper so

about half of this is a really solid Trans Am record imo

― some dude, Saturday, December 7, 2013 9:22 PM (Yesterday)

haha this is so otm, how did no one draw this comparison yet

yeah good call

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

If this whole album had been a bit like Touch I'd have freaking loved it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

didnt vote but excellent results

excellent resultzzzzzzzzzzz

Don't even remember which one "Fragments of Time" is.

v. surprised and pleased that "Fragments of Time" won this, it's a good little gem. reminiscent of Steely Dan in a way.

total steely dan.

Cannot agree re Trans Am, only overlap in that they both do "80s" but Trans Am's production sounded like a band on Thrill Jockey (they were good though).

Those are probably my five favourite songs on the album. Good work everyone.

I want to find voters of "Lose Yourself to Dance" and slap them with Trans Am cd's.

Hi!

By all means slap me with trans am. I haven't heard anything by em

saw them in 2001 -- ick. Bad makeup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQsAkl8cRS8

I always appreciated Trans Am as the dumbest looking band in rock.

There's competition, especially in the early 2000s

Lol I voted for "Lose Yourself to Dance" and have no idea who Trans Am are

as I said before, LYTD is awesome bc it sounds like DJ Quik

Seems like no one ever goes "that track sounds really like Daft Punk"

so i turn on this DirecTV music station called SubTerranean station that normally plays Synthpop type stuff. anyways it's reading "Fragments of Time" even though it has moved on to the next song couple of songs. stuck in time, actual song that is on is "Dreaming of Me" by Depeche Mode.

only just hit me that contact sounds like when i used to listen to the disco biscuits lol

"Give Live Back to Music v. Fragments of Time"

bingo. surprised "Instant Crush" and "Lose Yourself" were so high...cringiest songs on the album i thought. except maybe "Giorgio," w/ its nu metal breakdown and structural incoherence.

"Horizon" might not really count as an import bonus, but it's pretty lovely background music. top-tier Air basically, but that's miles above most of this stuff.

in retrospect this is a pretty terrible album

"Seems like no one ever goes "that track sounds really like Daft Punk""

"that track really sounds like Daft Punk" is one of my most-heard music comparisons. it just tends to be about songs by other artists, that sound like something off Discovery. no one says it about RAM for two true but somewhat contradictory reasons: 1) it's a Daft Punk album, so no one's going to state the obvious; 2) RAM actually sounds nothing like Daft Punk. i remember when this album was out and 'trending'/'killing it' my friend groaned in a cafe that he couldn't believe that what he was hearing in some restaurant ("Instant Crush") was the new Daft Punk song. his girlfriend just said, "it's not" -- and she was right.

"in retrospect this is a pretty terrible album"

said friend and i, as fond as classic Daft Punk as anybody, couldn't believe how alone we felt in hating this fuckin' record when it came out. it was a very rhetorically clever move on the band's part, in that they came to the conclusion that they could never again meet their fans' expectations by sounding "like Daft Punk," so they came up with this elaborate hoax about channeling the sound of the types of albums they used to sample -- a period of music almost none of their fans, or active critics today, really know anything about. hence the terminal defense of this album (see: lastfm, youtube) as "a type of music *you* just don't like/know anything about" from Daft Punk obsessives, despite the tendency of the people hating it to actually know a lot more about prog, mainstream disco and the '70s album golden age of studio excess than the people who really loved the thing. by the standards of the genres it's channeling, RAM is godawful.

but hey: "Give Life" and "Fragments" are quite nice. "Doin' It Right" isn't too shabby, either.

while i'm bothering to piss on this record's lingering embers: anyone remember the comedy that was Daft Punk's promised "remix series" for the album, song by song? even fans who loved RAM rejoiced that Daft Punk was finally going to be putting out new music that sounded like Daft Punk. then that abominable "Get Lucky" remix came out, everyone despised it, and Daft never said a word about the "series" again.

also annoyed that the one gift this record could have given us -- a touring lineup of Daft Punk with live musicians who could mix this material in with their older stuff in a sort of living, breathing Alive 2007 -- never came to fruition (and that all-star Grammys performance was weak af). but since Daft Punk tends to tour/do a live album in decade intervals, maybe we'll finally get that in '17.

lol wtf this record is gr8 fuiud

soyrev yeah a live daft punk band would have made this a bit more worthwhile. I like a bunch of the songs on their own but this is a really misshapen record that needed streamlining.

The album's structure and ~concept~ count it as prog in some measure.

@insufficiently not particularly! not even. but that was *the* red herring of pretty much every "discussion" of this album i saw (granted, i wasn't on ILM at the time, so i'll presume present company excluded). every time someone complained, there would be a greek chorus of naysayers to the tune of, "you just hate that it's not like discovery, daft punk made a prog album, we need to judge it by prog standards" etc etc. (by which standards, like any other, i personally think it's an embarrassing mess.)

i'll grant daft punk maybe didn't foresee these kinds of debates happening, but i do think they knew full well they could not succeed on the terms of the entire past decade+ of dance music they'd inspired (which, again, their "Get Lucky"/abortive self-remix series corroborates; these guys just don't have it anymore), and obviously as a cop-out human after all was a total failure (the narrative surrounding the hype of RAM made it seem like that album never even happened). so the decision to make this grandiose, rockist betrayal of everything they'd wrought (remember all those "back to REAL music" interviews they and all their collaborators gave for a full year around this thing, as though everybody should delete ableton and make a $2 million studio album) seemed really deliberate, and preemptive of the criticism they would have received had they done literally anything else with that album.

but yes, as circa1916 says, the structure/concept is def prog, and so are a fair number of the actual songs themselves ("giorgio" and three or four of the later tracks i can't get straight at this point – "beyond" and "touch" and all that).

i fuck w/"beyond" heavy

Human After All is fantastic

Only "narrative" I recall picking up on in RAM press ws that Thomas had been v down when making HAA and there ws some reaction to that in RAM

i thought that was guy-man

Oh I guess it was him then. Anyway that's abt all I remember of HAA's role in the RAM narrative

Feel kinda bad for Guy-Man now tbh

human after all is okay. it's better than RAM for sure. i actually dig the concept behind both albums (HAA especially), the execution is just miles off the mark.

(though they have a song apiece that really nails their album concepts: "give life" and "make love")

lose yourself to dance is hella good, nile's guitar shreds, and the beat fucking slaps hard, will accept pharrel's reedy voice as price of admission

I don't know about genres and narratives, but I sure do like the notes on this album. I particularly like the pitch and timbre of those notes, and how they arranged them and the beat with respect to time. The relative amplitudes of the notes? Yeah, I enjoy them too.

if i hadn't made it clear, i don't like any of those things about it, either =/

well I'm afraid that you must at least like the notes on the album. those notes show up on bunch of other albums imo.

christ.

every time someone complained, there would be a greek chorus of naysayers to the tune of, "you just hate that it's not like discovery, daft punk made a prog album, we need to judge it by prog standards" etc etc. (by which standards, like any other, i personally think it's an embarrassing mess.)

like, uh, okay, what?

is there another board where this reaction is documented

Maybe it ws Greek

loved this album, though i generally despise pharrell (i imagine daft punk know little about modern R&B, which is why they went for such a shitty vocalist) so found it hard to really like the songs he is on, though i still like lose yourself in spite of him having to sing it. i cant actually pick a favourite, when i was listening to this a lot, it changed all the time. though the instrumentals did seem the most dissapointing.

if you want real/old/proper daft punk, you should just go and find kanye's yeezus album.

@insufficiently lastfm daft punk page for /sure/ and youtube like heck. see also: twitter. i also was checking into the daft club forums a bit at the time, and iirc that was the general dichotomy of the reactions there as well.

i wouldn't be surprised if there was some of it here, too, but given i only really started checking these boards a few months ago that's a total guess on my part.

this album's execution is largely excellent in a very obvious way - the concept is easily the bigger 'problem' (in that it's ultimately not all that interesting to enough people besides DP to homage so directly so much)

it's pretty easy to forget about the concept ime

yeah it's not that big a problem I enjoyed listening to this regularly for a good 9 months at least :)

I listened to the whole thing a few weeks ago on the drive back from Big Ears and it sounded amazing! everything sounds so good on this record. I get why people who are used to super-punchy dance music don't like it but I'm just delighted with it. I like parts of Discovery a lot (esp. Voyager/High Life/Veridis Quo) but some parts fall flat for me because they're so underdeveloped; I appreciate that Daft Punk made a record where all of the songs are finished. if I want to hear a French touch disco loop record I'll go listen to those old Le Knight Club releases. a new Le Knight Club record is what the people really want, right?

"Game of Love" is underrated - listen to the gorgeous rhodes, the little guitar wikkas that disappear in the second half, the harmonized humming part that sounds like sine waves & the little vocoded "breath" sounds inserted in between

I listened to the whole thing a few weeks ago on the drive back from Big Ears and it sounded amazing! everything sounds so good on this record.

― example (crüt), Sunday, April 12, 2015 11:16 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm -- this album didn't fully click for me until driving to the beach

I like parts of Discovery a lot (esp. Voyager/High Life/Veridis Quo) but some parts fall flat for me because they're so underdeveloped; I appreciate that Daft Punk made a record where all of the songs are finished

I can't understand this... Discovery to me feels like a perfectly formed record from start to finish. RAM sounds like a rush job of muddled half-concepts.

I wish there'd been a bit more prog on RAM. Touch is as close as it gets but it sticks out on the album as something that could have been better presented elsewhere. A DP musical with a revolving cast of guest players would have been a great idea.

"Game of Love" is underrated - listen to the gorgeous rhodes, the little guitar wikkas that disappear in the second half, the harmonized humming part that sounds like sine waves & the little vocoded "breath" sounds inserted in between

― example (crüt)

This is a great description of why this song is so good.

record is comparable to recent dangelo record for sheer sonic pleasures.

album has some ropey drumming on it - i dont care if the drummer played on thriller. hes obv been playing some dodgy stuff since 1982.

I played most of it again today. It's still too soon to return. Refractory periods have their place.

i dont care if the drummer played on thriller. hes obv been playing some dodgy stuff since 1982.

he played on Off The Wall not Thriller and that's JR Robinson you philistine

i'll concede that Omar Hakim has played on some dodgy records though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkVW-y1pbME

I don't mind the drumming on this album at all, it's part of the reason I like 'Giorgio By Moroder' and 'Contact' so much!

Hakim played on Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, if I remember correctly?

"Touch" intro sounds like the intro here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2Z_mR3em1U