Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

The balance is a bit off. I could do with a little more Giorgio/Contact intensity and a little less robot-feels-sad-as-cocaine-wears-off vocoder crooning.

lol okay "Motherboard" is so far my favorite song on the album just by virtue of having the busiest, most interesting drums

yeah "Motherboard" is the only song I've liked without reservation so far

The balance is a bit off. I could do with a little more Giorgio/Contact intensity and a little less robot-feels-sad-as-cocaine-wears-off vocoder crooning.

― Deafening silence (DL), Tuesday, May 14, 2013 8:36 AM (2 minutes ago)

no way, the melancholy fuckbot parts are awesome

In the spirit of "too much time on ilx" I keep expecting Frank Gambale to turn up and give a monologue about pinball machines

Contact sucks imo, worst track on it. They should never make techno again.

whoopz. thought DJP said "Contact."

"Motherboard" is fantastic

"Fragments of Time"

okay this is the first song where I can agree with the Steely Dan comparisons

it's okay

I am tempted to go to the Janelle Monae thread and see how many of the people over there complaining about her being an overly theatrical theater kid are into this album

― far too much asshole flesh (DJP), Tuesday, May 14, 2013 3:23 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It would be misleading to conflate all the different potential meanings of "theatrical" though. DP don't do spirit fingers. Not least because they don't really have fingers.

The theatricality of "Touch" fits in with the narrative theatricality running through The Archandroid; I agree it's overstatement to compare the entire Daft Punk album to it.

they have beautiful fingers!

There's no spirit fingers in "Touch"?

If you want to see how people react to really bad theatricality in this sort of thing, check the Aeroplane thread.

i really love when the horns come in on touch and wish there was a whole song of that

There's also a lot more stylistic variation on The Archandroid with a lot of different moods on display, whereas this album basically alternates between "I'm in a lounge" and "I'm weeping in the mirror"

"Motherboard" is fantastic

otm.

You haven't gotten to Contact yet.

haha oh boy, I'm on the Panda Bear track

there are shades of "what if we made 'My Girls' slower and more tasteful" going on here performancewise

I'm finding it semi-compelling though in a way most of the rest of the album isn't

i thought the panda bear was fine. there's too much need to have a big garish opinion about his not as garish as usual guest spot.

The theatricality of Janelle is for better or worse tied up in self-presentation, the ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME undercurrent of the theatre-kid's theatricality.

I don't think it's possible to pinpoint a coherent personable identity behind the sound of the album (or even just "Touch") in order to facilitate the comparison, even if arguably the album is less varied stylistically as you say.

I'd sooner compare Basement Jaxx to Janelle.

this album basically alternates between "I'm in a lounge" and "I'm weeping in the mirror"

sold

It's their tribute to post-sellout Herbie Hancock. I dig it.

But there will never be another Discovery.

Does there have to be?

this album basically alternates between "I'm in a lounge" and "I'm snorting things off a mirror"

weeping cocaine iirc

alvin lucier b-sides xpost

watching the end of a party through mirrors

http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/5076/63720082vy5.jpg

this is all far better than the 1000 uses of "weeping robots" or "robots having sex" that i've read in ref to ram in the last few weeks

Looking at yourself in the mirror after snorting things off a mirror and feeling sad.

http://i.imgur.com/M6xfghs.jpg

http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/A.Sharkey/sadrobot.jpg

I don't think it's possible to pinpoint a coherent personable identity behind the sound of the album (or even just "Touch") in order to facilitate the comparison

I disagree very, very strongly with this. This is the most relentlessly personality-driven Daft Punk release I've heard, basically taking the earnestness of "Music Sounds Better With You" and reflecting it through 13 different prisms. Everything on here builds on top of each other in probably the most monolithic-feeling artistic statement I've heard from a non-hardcore band. I absolutely agree that narratively this album is not trying to do anything like what Monae was trying to do with her album; instead, it's telling a story through its musical choices and most of those choices seem to be saying "hey look, we can do Proper Music too". For me, the album doesn't really get interesting until they either find a good groove and stop fucking around with it (the non-solo parts of "Giorgio By Moroder") or they actually let the drummers loose (the rhythm sections are a big part of why the builds in "Motherboard" and "Contact" work and I think those are the most emotionally satisfying tracks on the album; in fact, I feel like the more they lean towards their 70s touchstones to generate an emotional response, the less successful they are at getting one from me).

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQMVU3sWeGuRifUsfhrfS9QbijTtpUaBLj9qqdPJr9j2hsyDX8

the earnestness of "Music Sounds Better With You"

was this really an earnest record?

plus music sounds better with you was not daft punk

Yeah, there is a weird disconnect between their fealty to disco and groove and the simultaneous distrust/subversion of groove.

xxxxpost but it's not a record about or apparently by a specific person or even "person" - I think that's crucial to the kind of theatricality that Janelle flaunts.

I just don't think "theatre kid" even remotely applies to this album and I don't think it's fair to act like it's inconsistent to like the theatre and dislike theatre kids.

Feeling sad after remixing JT's "Mirrors" and running out of coke

most of those choices seem to be saying "hey look, we can do Proper Music too"

it's so far from this. it's the opposite. this is the record to stop people assimilating them into the credibility canon, not to cement their place in it.

i think their place is already cemented in it

and as divisive as some of the influences are, a record with as much emphasis on craft and as many canonical guests on it as this is no way to extricate yourself from the canon

was this really an earnest record?

How can you not feel the giant waves of sobbing emotion coming off of the vocal from MSBWY?

plus music sounds better with you was not daft punk

Don't be dense. Not only is there a strong connection between Daft Punk and Stardust, the overarching musical strands of this album are directly connected to the sources sampled by Stardust, only without the gigantic thumping drums.

but it's not a record about or apparently by a specific person or even "person" - I think that's crucial to the kind of theatricality that Janelle flaunts.

No, it's theatrical for the sake of being theatrical, which is even more self-indulgent and off-putting IMO.

it's so far from this. it's the opposite.

... Their musical choices are saying "hey look, we can't do Proper Music"?

it's an oddball canon tho, don't think Paul Williams speaks to the canon-building fraternity really

yeah but you can't deny it's a very intentional flipping of the script!!

xposts to lex

I just don't think "theatre kid" even remotely applies to this album and I don't think it's fair to act like it's inconsistent to like the theatre and dislike theatre kids.

― Tim F, Tuesday, May 14, 2013 9:05 AM (6 minutes ago)

otm. there's some use of "theatricality" here, esp on "touch", but i don't get any sense of try-hard expressive exhibitionism from this album. the sensibility feels pretty reserved and curatorial to me, however deftly it may deploy signifiers of hedonistic abandon or glassy-eyed melancholy.