Best track on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

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.

Fragments of Time is pretty great but the rest of the album feels like quite a mess now and really needs editing.

Instant Crush & Lose Yourself to Dance are decent but drag on too long and could both easily lose a minute, which is really emphasised by Pharrell only writing a single verse for Lose Yourself to Dance. The single version of Get Lucky is definitely superior to the extended album version. Doin' It Right is horribly out of place and sounds like a terrible Panda Bear demo. The Game of Love, Within & Beyond are all kinda nothing-y songs that really miss what was good about the era they were replicating

Tbh I think this record did Ok culturally/commercially and DP can live w disappointing you guys

yeah so can Pitbull, what say we shut down the boards and just not talk about music anymore? great thanks

"The single version of Get Lucky is definitely superior to the extended album version."

yes yes yes. the structure/pacing on the single is just right. if that were what's on the album, i'd add it on the shortlist of keepers i mentioned above. the album version plods like hell and feels really unsure of itself, though. interesting how a really nice song can be slightly extended into something almost unlistenable (equally true of Perfume's "Spending All My Time," the only other recent single to which i think this phenomenon applies)

as for "lose yourself to dance," i think it approaches self-parody. the way the vocoded "come on" grates against what's already a thin arrangement, over and over and over...still a very Lonely Island moment to my ears. "The Game Of Love" also feels pretty jokey, too, as a kind of sneer at the ancient "sad robot" cliche.

Love this album, hope they do a sequel w same cast

imo the peak form of 'get lucky' was the teaser trailer, next daft punk album should be a couple of hundred 15-second long snippets of songs that'll never be heard

in retrospect at the time this is was a pretty terrible album

― but then again, who really cares? I don’t. (dog latin),

this album is still amazing (most of) you guys are nuts

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.

still love every minute of this album but this^ is 100% otm

the way the vocoded "come on" grates against what's already a thin arrangement, over and over and over...

This. I like the song okay but it goes on for ages and always sounds like the robot's begging for it to end.

Yeah, I still love everything about this album.

Voted for Lose Yourself To Dance at the time but would probably go with Fragments Of Time now.

"Get Lucky" is a great single. RAM is not a great album.

it is a timeless classic

I think it's a great album. Can't think of anything else that I played front to back as many times as RAM in the past couple of years.

This album is total horsehit aside from three songs

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

:|

i haven't listened to it in a while but iirc i still like this very exhausting record

i think the wrongness and the skeletal and drifting qualities of some of the pastiches actually contributes to my enjoyment of the record? you can hear the music they're aiming for spectrally, but it's impossible to precisely simulate, and the tension between those things is very rich imo

also "nu metal breakdown" smh

This album is total horsehit aside from three songs

― DJP, Saturday, April 11, 2015 6:40 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If those three are "Giorgio By Moroder", "Get Lucky", and "Give Life Back to Music" then this is OTM!!

haven't heard it in a while, but pretty sure I would still love it, aside from "Giorgio"

this album is ... not for me

listened today and confirmed it is still the best album of music

i think the wrongness and the skeletal and drifting qualities of some of the pastiches actually contributes to my enjoyment of the record? you can hear the music they're aiming for spectrally, but it's impossible to precisely simulate, and the tension between those things is very rich imo

to add to this i guess my main criticism of the record is that discovery already did this, but i enjoy the sound of them going full tribute act. it's like george benson fanfiction

hahaha yes "george benson fanfiction"

if by "you can hear the music they're aiming for spectrally" means "enduring Pharrell's fucking awful singing on 'Lose Yourself to Dance,'" then write your own fan fiction.

If those three are "Giorgio By Moroder", "Get Lucky", and "Give Life Back to Music" then this is OTM!!

Oh Mr Snrub *chuckles to self while bemusedly shaking head*

lol alfred

This record genuinely helped me through an exceptionally difficult period. I can't think of any other album in at least the last 10 years that I played so often, and absorbed so intently. The sequencing felt spot-on, and the cumulative message hit me where it mattered.

But that was two years ago, and I've not since been minded to break out of the inevitable refractory period.

Until now. I'll give it another listen tomorrow, and will pray that it hasn't all turned to shit.

here take my shirt and just go ahead and wipe up all the sweat sweat sweat

@insufficiently fam listen to the five-string bass and record scratches at the end of "giorgio." total nu metal

and yes, some critics know about mainstream disco and fleetwood mac and all that, but really not many are at all literate w/r/t prog. and then daft punk's fanbase generally knows almost nothing about any of that stuff. "prog" was the single biggest witchhunt word directed towards anyone who had an opinion about RAM that was even just one degree cooler than "it's revolutionary"

is there more prog here than there is disco/post-disco/"what a fool believes"?

add jazz fusion to that mix

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