Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

lol, did you buy any asparagus?

Asparagus isn't really what it was in 1997, now it's like Disneyfied asparagus or something. No one who really likes vegetables would even bother with it now.

Has this been posted here yet? http://www.peterserafinowicz.com/blog/mark-e-smith-vs-daft-punk/

haha matt

for real tho, feel like samphire is the headz choice these days

yes xp. can someone start a serafinowicz thread to keep his stuff there? : (

Headed for a US #1.

http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2013/05/random-access-moroder/

sfj: "I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard."

http://newyorker.com/arts/critics/musical/2013/05/27/130527crmu_music_frerejones

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18028-daft-punk-random-access-memories/

Am I the only one who's gone from thinking SFJ was a fantastic writer to not really caring what he says about anything anymore?

I generally don't either but he's mostly otm.

in that piece

So Random Access Memories got the exact same Pitchfork score as Kaputt did, which was also reviewed by Mark Richardson. Coincidence? Probably.

had a an illuminating conversation with the cashier about the sonic lushness of it and the new Kurt Vile album

― The Pastiche Liberation Front (sonnyboy), Monday, May 20, 2013 2:57 AM (4 hours ago)

lol, i bought a vinyl copy of the new KV yesterday and am currently listening to it for the first time*. my first thought was "this is at least as good a comparison point for random access memories as kaputt."

* an excellent album, btw, don't know why i put it off for so long

Haven't read the review, but Mark is an excellent writer. Not surprised that he reviewed it, because if anyone can make a strong case for a divisive album it's him. Wouldn't be surprised if the same though was behind the Destroyer review.

Like, if I saw whatever number grade the review got, and it was written by Ian Cohen, I wouldn't bother. But with Mark's name attached, I'm going to give it a read.

that is their highest rating for a Daft Punk studio album by a good margin

The score comes with the preceding cover-story as a package-deal.

In 2007, Kanye West’s single “Stronger” used a sample from the song, and helped nudge hip-hop toward the sounds of the club.

why the fuck do ppl say stupid shit like this

I increasingly don't understand SFJ's approach of describing bit by bit how a track proceeds. Ellen Willis was explaining pop to NYer readers over 40 years ago and she didn't feel obliged to do that. Just get to the big picture argument. It feels here that he's describing tracks in detail in lieu of getting off the fence and saying if he likes them or not. He makes some elegant points along the way but if I were a NYer reader who wasn't particularly pop-savvy I'd have no idea whether to check out the record.

Also smh that he singles out Giorgio By Moroder as a dud. I don't think I've ever recovered my respect for his taste since he said Let England Shake was PJ Harvey's worst album.

The score comes with the preceding cover-story as a package-deal.

― Evan, Monday, May 20, 2013 10:09 AM (12 minutes ago)

daft punk truth now!

xpost I don't think his piece is that hard to parce. I mean, I think Giorgio By Moroder is equally awesome and terrible, too. I can't imagine ever playing it all the way through again, but find plenty to like in it when it's on. I think it should have been a hidden bonus track, or an instrumental, but I wouldn't recommend people avoid it. Which is basically what he is getting at, too. I mean, he makes it explicit: "This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought. This album does what it sets out to do about as well as anyone could ever do it. Is that good enough? Dunno, but if I had no idea what this band was about and read this piece, I'd be inclined to check it out.

Agree that he should stick to the big picture stuff, though.

I suppose I find his point glib. It's not really a radical question.

And Giorgio By Moroder is my favourite track so I don't get how it's symptomatic of awesome/terrible. Fragments of Time or Touch maybe.

This makes it seem like I'm more down on SFJ than I am. I still enjoy reading him but I tend to leave his reviews feeling a little undernourished these days.

why the fuck do ppl say stupid shit like this

― AMERICA IS ABOUT RESSLING (DJP), Monday, May 20, 2013 11:14 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

i just think that "club" is being used too generically. obviously rap has been played in clubs since the beginning of its existence.

rock rock to the planet rock

UKers who pre-ordered the vinyl - has yours arrived yet? Mine hasn't :(

I don't think I've ever recovered my respect for his taste since he said Let England Shake was PJ Harvey's worst album.

I didn't know that, I stopped reading him when he begged people for money to buy a new hard drive.

lol

I googled that. Jesus. Hard times.

I didn't know that, I stopped reading him when he begged people for money to buy a new hard drive.

Oh shit, totally forgot about this. OK, not totally, but enough that I couldn't figure out why just seeing his byline made me giggle.

“Lose Yourself to Dance”, on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach

GTFO P4K

"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought.

haven't read the sfj piece yet but out of context: no

the boat OTM

Seriously, there's so many things wrong with that one sentence. Calling Daft Punk's approach "backward-looking" alone is a travesty. Using musical styles that have been long around does not equate to "backward-looking". If anything this is a very forward-thinking, futuristic record.

This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?

oh come on. he's too smart to coyly pretend there is any such thing ("good", i mean really). he's just saying that music can succeed on its own terms and still seem awful to him. which should be obvious enough to go without saying.

"nostalgia on shuffle" as described by someone upthread (sorry, can't remember who and it's beneath the cut) does seem accurate though - "backward-looking" is just a harsher way of saying the same thing

The disco perfection of that song is echoed in the opening track, “Give Music Back to Life,”

and this is the new yorker, right? fact checking cuz to the world?

xp - yeah, though i love the album, i can buy backward-looking, even as a criticism

as for the marketing stuff - i wasn't online this weekend, just catching up - it's only music that gets perennially praised so unreservedly for its PR wizardry! no one has said "oh but the great gatsby film was so well marketed, everyone's talking about it" and no one says it about idk innocent smoothies either. people queue up to hate on innocent's marketing (rightly so) and to slag off the great gatsby as a work of art

"This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?" It's an intriguing thought.

this is a horrible sentence for any writer to file and in fact a complete non-thought, though

an even more accurate description than "nostalgia on shuffle" might be "random access memories"

haha but random is the absolute last thing this album is

it's like shuffle but not random

think about it

and they're robots get it

wait is RAM actually random? cos wtf

glad we're finally getting to the bottom of this

I think what lex is trying to get at here is that computers can't truly generate randomness

in this context (RAM as in computer memory = "random access memory") it means you can access data ("memories") in any order you want, immediately, smooshing it against other totally disassociated data if you like, rather than having to proceed chronologically through the entire memory record in order to get to the stuff you're interested in. it's actually a pretty clever title! cuz also robots.

Nostalgia On Shuffle ft. Lou Sayer.