Best track on Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

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

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.