Daft Punks's "Discovery" : Classic or Dud

"nightvision"... low key the best track

i'm kidding, it's "voyager," but "nightvision" is amazing

There's certainly a sense in which "One More Time" was 'late', arriving at the end of 2000 quite a bit of time after filter / french house had been thoroughly codified - it even sounds a bit like Phats & Small's "Turnaround" from 1999, and that's probably the archetypal 'generic' vocal filter house track.

But, of course, that was entirely deliberate. The song is literally about the decadence of extending the party a bit longer than it ought to run, and at less specific level I feel like it acts as a tribute to the feeling of succumbing (of allowing yourself) to the familiar and the obvious.

I already thought that at the time, but that sense felt affirmed when subsequently Kylie released "Love at First Sight", a song which functions very much in the same way, both in the sense of trucking with the same aesthetic preoccupations and in the sense of summoning up a similar vibe or feeling.

I wouldn't call either track weak now, to be clear. The extended break in "One More Time" used to be a momentum killer for me, but I appreciate it now. It's just that this is an amazing album and some track has to be the weakest!

One More Time was love at first sound. I recall the first time I heard it, out getting some fast food and it was on the radio inside. Just felt like utopian party music.

"love at first sight" is even closer in feeling to "music sounds better with you"

I’m shaking my head at people not liking “one more time”

one of the very best things about Discovery is that it has a enormous influence upon Kylie's Fever…

I've never enjoyed One More Time. I know the enervated sound is the point, but I don't have to like it.

I'm sure I have my Interstella 5555 DVD somewhere (will need to remember how to hook up my DVD player to the TV, will be worth it for Face To Face at least)

I'm similar to other posters in lumping "One More Time" in with a lot of other fodder they used to play at the student club nights I used to go to around the time. I was familiar with their earlier stuff but not yet a fan and "One More Time" just reminds me of £1 Smirnoff Ices and bad times dancing. It wasn't until I started working in a bar after uni that someone played me the whole of Discovery and I fell in love with it and went back to reassess everything else they'd done. I still don't like OMT though

Dakadakada-da-da / Zoo-whoa / Dakadakada-da-da / Mister Ferdinand

“one more time” doesn’t sound like the other fodder though, for starters it spends two and a half minutes (or, half of the song) doing that acapella build-up which I don’t remember any other song from the era doing.

how many dance or pop songs from any era do you remember that do 2 full minutes without beat.

It's a good question (should be noted that the drums and main sample drop out but the organ never drops out and the tambourine comes in and out).

It also ties it to the space disco concept. Having a breakdown of 2 minutes with nothing but vocals and a synth both drenched in reverb gives a feeling of floating in outer space.

they’re horns

the breakdown is definitely the best part of "one more time," won't hear any arguments to the contrary i'm sorry

In the breakdown!?

It sounds like some synth organ with heavy reverb to me not like horns but what do I know. Whatever it is, my point stands: that elongated breakdown makes it stand out from the rest. I can understand maybe not liking the song, but saying it’s fodder is unfair.

oh the breakdown. sorry.

no it is unfair, it's just that i came to it being played alongside a lot of stuff i just couldn't connect to at the time

In the Clubhouse discussion that got posted on one of these threads, Todd Edwards talks about the recording process of “Face to Face,” and he talks about stringing together samples from a bunch of different records but doesn’t mention anything being re-recorded. They may have layered on top of samples in some instances to thicken the parts in the mix but I don’t think it was possible for Daft Punk to fully recreate these samples so faithfully. They don’t have ‘70s session chops and they were working out of a home studio.

― eisimpleir (crüt), Thursday, February 25, 2021 7:58 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I’ll admit I forgot about “face to face” of course Todd Edwards style is to distort samples beyond recognition and clip them to short instances of unrecognizable-ness

But I’m still questioning the idea that the songs that ie seem to interpolate “get down Saturday night” for example actually sample get down Saturday night

oh I didn't realize you were talking about that one! I don't think Voyager is a sample tbf, I've heard the comparison before but it sounds very different to me

After getting texted random opinions about Discovery, I have decided to rewatch Interstella 5555, and I'm already feeling that same anxiety I felt during Aerodynamic!

On the topic of sampling / acknowledgement on the album - an LA Times subscriber-exclusive story about Eddie Johns, whose "More Spell On You" was sampled for One More Time (but uncredited), living in homeless situations for years... while DP have been paying royalties, to a local company that swallowed some catalogue in 1995.

Still so so f***ing good. All of it. Hard to believe I now have co-workers as old as this record!

Rundgren/Buggles/ZTT comparison way upthread in the halcyon days is very otm.

Yeah. Absolutely loved Homework at the time as was massively into techno back then but this is definitely my favourite of theirs now.

Cherished memory: taking the train across Chicago on a class break to Gramophone Records to pick up the (one-sided) 12" of this the day it came out. Returning for classes, training home and then playing it later that night at a pretty good-sized warehouse party where I would imagine 95% of the dancers had no idea what it was.

Lovely memory, I have since lost it but the Daft Club credit card had a spot in my wallet for many years

Great memory! Reminds me of a night Basement Jaxx dj'ed in NYC to a packed room. A phenomenal set of house and dancey post punk classics which slowly morphed into an unannounced preview for "Rooty". The crowd went bananas (no pun) with each new tune.

That sounds amazing, Psychocandles

A real polarizing one. As an older millenial I love this album, including OMT. Older than me, Gen X? Anywhere from just-not-their-thing to really despising it. Younger than me, Gen Z: one of the most, if not THE seminal dance music album lol.

maybe it is an age thing as i just dgaf about it. would not make my top 1000 best dance records.

i do think a couple of tracks are ok.

Definitely all time for me. What's not to love?

And I'll say this now: I can give or take pretty much all their other albums, probably make a nice comp of the best of those records, but there is nothing on Discovery I don't really really enjoy. It's their masterpiece, undoubtedly

A real polarizing one. As an older millenial I love this album, including OMT. Older than me, Gen X? Anywhere from just-not-their-thing to really despising it. Younger than me, Gen Z: one of the most, if not THE seminal dance music album lol.

― Reeves Gabrels' Funko Pop (majorairbro)

It’s kind of a “skip a gen” thing that happens a lot. Plenty of Gen X thought of several rock acts of the 70’s as boomer music, but milennials loved their dose of 70’s rock. I guess for Gen Z discovering “classic” albums from the early 00’s is similar to Milennials discovering Innervisions or Dark Side of the Moon or something like that.

by far their best album

It helps keeping it in mind as an aging act to probably take a decade off and have children or whatever after your prime and come back a hero to the next generation.

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

Daft Punk did the right move retiring in 2013 as they would’ve risked losing their momentum.

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

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

From the few times it has entered conversation with them my perception was that they all love Discovery and think it’s their best but very underrated. They think the popular one is RAM - which maybe chart wise they have a point - and that more people should get into Discovery. I was a bit baffled when they told me Discovery was like a lost gem.

Maybe it's because Get Lucky is kind of a "Hey let's do a big Discovery-style pop banger" song whereas most of the rest of the album is rainy sad jazz robot music, so people who enjoyed that one growing up also enjoy Discovery. Just a guess

Also it's 20+ years old now so ripe for retro-nostalgia

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

my take as someone on the edge of gen y/z depending on definitions is that it has some fantastic, all-time classic singles and a few great moments beyond that but i don't really care about the middle section too much

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.