Daft Punks's "Discovery" : Classic or Dud

I just bought this album last week, btw. I am still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

I think I probably prefer Discovery, and in a way the live album is amazing too, but fuck it I'm completely unreliable as regards Daft Punk.

FWIW my favourite Bangalter/Daft related thing is probably the Bangalter/Falcon stuff or "Music Sounds Better With You". And I think Carnival by Archigram is better than all of the above and anything on either Daft Punk album. And yes I could talk about this ALL DAY!

just think what your life would have been like if you had told her, "yeah, daft punk rules"!

vocoders are like anything else, they can be employed poorly or well.

I nearly bought a vocoder last month.

Wait - Techno?! Okay, whatever. I dunno, I heard Discovery and was blown away and then I bought Homework thinking it was just as lush but instead was greeted with maybe a couple of good (but overlong) tracks mixed with nothing but "Whump whump whump whump". Sometimes the whumping goes on for a good five minutes without actually doing anything. Sometimes DP treat us to a 303 noise for the last two minutes of the track. But yeh, I can never see why a lot of people prize this so much and then say that Discovery is rubbish.

Just relax and feel the groove, dl.

dan to thread

it is dance music, afterall.

He was always good with genre.

no, ronan, i think it's your mom who says that OH MY GOD OH NO PFFT

I just realized the potentially disasterous implications of this acronym in this phrase.

it is dance music, afterall.

Who said dance music had to be so deadly dull though? Surely dance is all about build ups and break downs and cheeky little bits that make you sit up and take notice. Granted, Discovery is perhaps more of a rock album compared to Homework but it is testament to the way dance can make you feel exhilarated and keep you bouncing around, new ideas hitting you at every turn.

Homework may have harder beats but they're really unpleasant to listen to (and I like Gabba). It's this kind of depressed mid-tempo whumping noise. It doesn't do anything to improve my life.

Okay, Morrissey.

a group of twenty somethings lit up when i played 'digital love' the other night. that doesn't usually happen.

They left pretty much untouched and seen as the coolest music ever even when the last album was frankly subpar. You’d see it at the top of eoy lists everywhere that year - as well as “get lucky” on the tracks polls - but by the end of the decade the shine got lost and very few people cared about it

― ✖✖✖ (Moka)

I'm not sure this is totally true. Pitchfork definitely lowered their score when they did that albums revaluation thing a couple of years ago, but I think a lot of people are still into that album. At the record shop I work at in Saint Paul we sell a ton of Daft Punk and Random Access Memories is their biggest seller. People were even willing to shell out for the deluxe version earlier this year as well. It's still rated very highly on Rate Your Music (bolded and has 3.7 rating which is higher than Homework). It did appear in a few end of decade lists too including our very own. A lot of people did cool on it, but it's hardly a Be Here Now situation or anything.

Yeah you’re right “not cared about it” is too harsh… I meant that the hype of it definitely died down.

Here on ILM per example Get Lucky was voted #1 song of the year and RAM #2 album of 2013.

By the time we rolled the eod poll “get lucky didn’t even made it into the top 100 and RAM placed #56 several places below other albums from 2013.

46 years old and Discovery was a huge album for me. I already owned Homework which I liked but didn’t love. Discovery >>> live albums > homework >>> HAA = RAM

Yeah agree with that ranking tbh

Discovery is very clearly their best album imho. They could’ve probably trimmed a couple of tracks - personally I’d probably get rid of the 1-2 pack of “superheroes”, “high life” which are ok songs but make the album lose steam after those great 4 opening tracks. Crescendolls into nightvision works for me - I know the latter sounds like filler but it helps bring down the energy to settle into “something about us” and the album would benefit of being 12 tracks instead of 14.

Also most definitely edit “too long” into “not too long” and save the “too long” version as a b-side or whatever. I know some people like it but it’s a terrible closer as it stands.

I really like how superheroes morphs though… it kind of redeems the whole thing for me. Still, it would have worked better as a b-side to Aerodynamic or something.

it’s weird to think of somebody finding Discover _after_ RAM and i would love to hear what they thought of Homework then (which i’ll always rate higher than anything else but i do enjoy Discovery for what it is and hey, it’s got Todd Edwards)

also a record store guy over here! I would say that RAM sells very well, but Discovery and Homework seem to sell a little better, simply because they've been a little less available the last ten years... it seems like more of a score for customers. Some people were willing to shell out for the deluxe edition, but not many. A $60-$120 box set for any album from 2010 to present is not as appetizing as you'd think.

Yeah you’re right “not cared about it” is too harsh… I meant that the hype of it definitely died down.

Here on ILM per example Get Lucky was voted #1 song of the year and RAM #2 album of 2013.

By the time we rolled the eod poll “get lucky didn’t even made it into the top 100 and RAM placed #56 several places below other albums from 2013.

― ✖✖✖ (Moka), Tuesday, August 8, 2023 3:21 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that's an incredible phenomenon. I remember DJing a work's summer party the year it came out and I had to break my "no song more than once" three times in the night becaus people loved it so much. Later I went on holiday with a bunch of friends and that song was on repeat. And I didn't care - I loved it!

Daft Punk were back with an actual cool song, one everyone could dance and sing along to. It was OMT all over again. Of course it was SOTY.

These days? Oh jesus, I never need to hear it again. Never ever ever. Shaky video footage of mashed up townies in Ayebeefa. Endless plays on the local radio station I work for jammed in next to 'Rude' and 'Galway Girl'... Never!

But I think another big factor is the context of hearing it on RAM. Call it the "Fat Of The Land" factor: Big band comes back with a world-dominating mega-hit that everyone goes ballistic for. But when the album comes out, it's underwhelmingly all of the same pallette, with said single being the key highlight. It's not that the album is bad, not at all, but it feels more like different, varyingly paler, iterations of the big hit single, which ends up having an adverse effect on one's perception of the single.

I love the mid section of Discovery after the opening four-song hit salvo.

'Crescendolls' is a proper party banger in its own right.

'Nightvision' is a nice, short, well-needed salve with those synth washes which I always enjoy.

'Superheroes' harks back to Homework with its repetitive filter sample 4/4 thing going on. Always used to enjoy getting stoned with my best friend at uni and trying to figure out what they were singing. We settled on "golf in the air". Love the triumphant 16-bit marching-band vibe as well - makes me think of when you win the Gold Cup in Super Mario Kart. Aptly named.

'High Life' and maybe 'Voyager' are the two track I might drop if I absolutely had to as they don't bring much new to the table. Still, neither is unpleasant or boring. I'd be sad to lose either of them and they serve as well-placed pacers to guide the flow of the album*.

'Something About Us' is gorgeous and I would have it on any Best Of playlist. You could say it sets the template for RAM, but it works so well here and the interplay between the bass and guitar is just so satisfying. The lyrics have, at once, that slightly janky Euro feeling while still being very touching. This is going to sound ridiculous but it makes me think of ABBA - maybe not as tragic as something like 'One Of Us', but there's something about the melancholy groove that hits the same way for me.

As a big fan of JRPG soundtracks, 'Veridis Quo' I would also include on any 'Best of' playlist. Not much to say other than I love this sort of medieval village SNES adventure story vibe.

*I'd hold this up as being one of those records that flows perfectly, which I can happily listen to all the way through as a performance rather than skipping anything or feeling like anything juts out too badly.

Veridis Quo also one of my favorite bits on the album.

“Something about us” probably their best song to crossover into other genres. I’ve heard live renditions of it as a jazz improv instrumental, a groovy funk number and a cafeteria band version with piano and acoustic guitars. Sounded great in every version.

i can understand thinking discovery is underrated if your experience of daft punk in pop culture is just them being the one-hit wonders who made "get lucky" (which it would be for a lot of younger people) - finding out that they made some great and quite stylistically different music much earlier must seem quite odd

― ufo, Monday, August 7, 2023 8:34 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is a pretty cool phenomenon, maybe something that could be its own thread. for me I had this experience with Underworld, I only knew Born Slippy and Beacoup Fish, when I discovered all the stuff they'd done prior to that it really blew my mind. I guess it wasn't terribly different but I'd thought of them as being similar to Fatboy Slim and the Chemical Bros. so hearing that stuff was really cool. I love the stories of people in the 80s really digging "Owner of a Lonely Heart" and then discovering Close to the Edge a few months later.

Happened a lot for me when I was 11, 12 in the mid 90’s. My first approach for several “legacy” acts was with their most recent hits as presented in compilations like “Now!” So per example this were all songs I first heard by these artists:

The Cure - mint car
Rolling Stones - anybody seen my baby
Inxs - elegantly wasted
Pet shop boys - se a vida e
Def leppard - slang
Queen - heaven for everyone
Bon jovi - something for the pain

Just to name a few… it was weird there were massive fans of these bands by what I had sampled. It would take at least another 4 years for me to actually start listening to any of these bands and realize I had started with all the wrong tracks and albums.

probably a lot of people having that same experience with Animal Collective in 2009

Also Radiohead I guess, for many younger generations their first Radiohead album was hail to the thief or in rainbows.

For me it was the Velvet Underground. The only LP (in print or otherwise) I could find when I got into them was the 1985 odds & ends comp... which is not to say it wasn't a great listen but certainly not on par with the big 4. Then a couple years later I found a SEALED copy of WLWH for $8.99 lol.

REM too - I was first aware of them as the band that did Shiny Happy People with the singer out of B52's when I was about 10. Later got Out Of Time out the library as a young teen, and soon after that Automatic For The People came out, this very big serious grown-up album. It was ages until I walked into a bigger record store and realised they had stacks of albums prior to that.

Loads of people must have come to Blur via Song 2.

I also know people who came to the Prodigy via stuff like Warrior's Dance who say the earlier albums sound thin and old-hat. Nutters

See also:

Madonna - Ray of Light album (and chart singles)
Santana - Supernatural (and smooth)
Cher with Believe
Most recently Elton John for newer generations with the Dua Lipa remix/cover thing.

Ditto the falsetto TikTokification of pretty much every song ever made

xp I definitely had a wrong impression of Blur after "Song 2". Years later I realized I DID know another Blur song - "Girls and Boys" - but had no inkling it was the same band

Are Gen Z really into Discovery? Great if so, cause I find most younger Gen Ys seem to think RAM is their best, which is totally baffling to me

― Roz

A fairly good barometer of what online Gen Z music people think is RYM, where it sits at #79 of all time.

If anything I think the zoomer love for RAM is growing, in spite of the grubbing it seems to have increasingly gotten elsewhere. My love for it has probably grown too. How I wish drums sounded like that on every pop or rock (or disco) record made today.

yeah I found most of RAM to be a strung out snoozefest too but no doubt it's a really great sounding record which shows the kind of shit you can and should be doing with an actual budget, I wish more big acts tried to sound like that

Happened a lot for me when I was 11, 12 in the mid 90’s. My first approach for several “legacy” acts was with their most recent hits as presented in compilations like “Now!” So per example this were all songs I first heard by these artists

This was always me when I was little - the years-long gaps between loving lots of songs by an artist (in childhood) and becoming an actual 'fan' (generally in adolescence) - but it was sometimes via some probably odd tracks, i.e.

David Bowie - New Killer Star (via Brit Awards 2004) (I did already sort of know "Heroes" but never listened to it)
Erasure - Solsbury Hill (via Now 54)
George Michael - Flawless (Go to the City) (via Now 58) and the Shapeshifters Remix (via numerous summer 04 club compilations) (again, I sort of liked Fastlove but rarely listened to it)

My opinion of Human After All has increased over the years and RAM declined sharply after I initially enjoyed it. Now they’re even for last place, although neither are bad by any means.

Human After All is my favourite

the best Daft Punk album is the Musique Vol 1 best-of compilation and even that suffers by using the radio version of One More Time and by not featuring Burnin'

“Something about us” seems the most RAM thing on the album

Not exactly what you're asking, but a few music enthusiasts my age had their first serious encounter with David Bowie via Blackstar.

Prince’s Batman would be mine