Daft Punk - Human After All

But maybe I'm just not in the mood.

Stop talking about me. ;-) I think the reason why I never bothered with the music: the cutesy videoclip I saw on MTV. I know it's wrong to dislike a band based on a videoclip. But it's not that I really disliked'em, I just didn't care about their image so didn't bother with the music. All in all I find HAA to be a good album. No more no less. Probably would give it a seven (tops). I don't really like it as a *whole*, I like some elements IMMENSELY. But to hate the album? I can understand, just don't agree at all.

HA! This is sooo true. :) One of my favourite tracks on the album (probably my inner AC/DC teenage self.)

Did their image not contain the potential to improve your own, or do you see image as a good measure of what an act will sound like?

Maybe it's cause I'm an 80's baby and most of my generation's attention span's are shot, I dunno.

It sucks cause all of the songs start off as really good ideas.

(New and highly dubious theory - DP have done this deliberately and it is some wanky postmodern attempt to make a point over the course album they new full well was going to get loads of critical attention in the aftermath of Discovery. A point *maybe* supported by rumours of another album in the pipeline later this year.)

hmm, can you list a few tho?

i think it's because when considering their profile and the images they like to project, it comes off as more frustrating even contemptible than with more anonymous producers who haven't cultivated such a mystique. i think Daft Punk are exactly like Kraftwerk in this respect - i've always found Kraftwerk hugely frustrating at times because you know they could do more, but they just don't seem interested in doing more, and what they are interested in doing at times is completely uninteresting to me. with DP GuyMan's always seemed the shyer, moodier one and in a way this makes the Crydamoure stuff more 'acceptable', because it's in a more appropriate context on Waves 2 or a live DJ set or just the label's latest 12" following on from the last one. it's the same with much of Bangalter's solo work - in the right contexts it's no problem, but HAA is dressed up and made out to be a big event plus it's got to stand up to the other two albums somehow so you can understand why the frustration occurs with such a limited palette of sounds and ideas on this one, because we know what they COULD do more... (i still like it ok enough btw)

I'll probably get this on vinyl when it arrives here, but if I decide to get it on CD, it will likely pop up in the used bins in about, oh, a month or so.

I want to avoid using terrible "less is more" puns ... but "more" in this case equals "dance music + pop-oriented song structure", because that's what we're used to from DP. And moreso, let's face it, polishing any genre of music into a more pop-tastic sheen is the ideal for many ILM'ers.

However, not everyone hears a minimalist dance track and thinks "they could have put *more* into this record". In a track like "Emotion", I hear a lot of Vainqueur's swirls and G-Man's slowed-down funk, and I can't say that I've ever listened to those artists and wished that their could have done "more" with their music.

Having finally heard the album i can sorta tentatively agree with this but I think it's only true for some of the tracks. The title track and "Robot Rock" and "Television Rules The Nation" may flaunt their repetition, but "Steam Machine" and "The Brainwasher" and "Technologic" are much closer to what feels like "standard practice" for that sort of sound (they're also the three most successful dance qua dance tracks on the album, I reckon). "The Prime Time Of Your Life" kinda falls outside the equation anyway, and "Make Love" and "Emotion" are highly repetitive but in a way that feels much more familiar and comfortable ("Emotion" in particular is ace in this regard, but what is the track it reminds me of so intensely? Something with a short vocoder loop going through the whole thing as a sort of bassline).

What unites the first three tracks is that they each pour all their energy into a single, intensely catchy hook which is then repeated ad infinitum, but the tracks themselves aren't particularly dancefloor bombs, they never take off in the manner which we're accustomed to with French House - if anything, they feel like nothing but a looped breakdown rather than an absence of breakdowns. Were it a case of the latter these tracks might be closer to "So Much Love To Give" or "Call On Me" or a Crydamoure production.

I think this is deliberate rather than lazy (though I can't guess at the motive) - there's a moment in most of the tracks here where the duo will introduce a single element - a snare, a synth variation etc. - which threatens to send the whole thing over the top, and then they pull it back again. It feels like a rather restrained album to me, in the same way that Discovery felt restrained in places but without the pop-song structure that would explain/complement/contextualise it.

I think "Steam Machine" may be my favourite track, though at the moment it's all up for grabs. "The Prime Time Of Your Life" is the track that suffers most for its brevity I reckon - it should be twice as long!

Yes! "Emotion" could use another three or four minutes, and if "Make Love" had a bit more variation and a beatless intro or outro then it could have topped eight or nine minutes, no problem.

The Tony Senghore/>7 track "Herbalise Me", for example, kills everything off Human After All alone. I defer to Jess's point on this album...

A bit depressingly literal- it is two Robots, Rocking Out- but still kind of fun. Not a patch on the Jonze/Gondry/Matsumoto videos, but not bad either.

I only have a couple of their releases:

The 12" "Higher" which is EXCELLENT. The main track starts off sounding like really pulsing weird diva house, and but then it gets really fucking noisy, 303'ed out, and just extremely fucked up

And there's the double album Love Addict which is at least half amazing.

Both from 1998.

I'll also put in my vote for the double 12"/single "Bleep to Bleep" by the Micronauts as a forgetten great French noisy house classic.

Spot on. I have Impulsion's 'Rock Le House Musiq' 12", which is crazy and good and the Micronauts also deserved way mo' (that remix of 'Block Rockin' Beats' is probably better than I remember, and the reprise remix of the same is really hot, with a calypso breakdown).

Sort of a longshot: but is this a relatively slow/big sounding track with loadsa scratching sounds? (still my holy grail, heard it around that time 96-97?)

ILM is not the rest of the world SHOCKA. ;)
No but really, doesn't surprise me at all. Critics don't break records any more (if this ever was the case.)And reactions have been 50/50 all along, probably even disappointed fans have purchased HAA and as I've been saying, there is a group of people who like this better than Discovery. So #10 sounds about right.

Yeah, tho' I haven't heard it in a while, so I may be off a little.

ohboy, ohboy...will I finally find peace of mind. :)

well i'm not ILM

this is true. ;) You believe tv ads would make a difference? I'm sceptical about this. The "what a disaster/joke" anti-hype just seemed premature in retrospect.

But this new A-Frames' Black Forest (that also came out today) is amazing.. and I'm dancing to it a lot more than Human After All