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The Walking Dad posted:I wonder why people are so confused about the hype for this really. Because hyperbole is gross by definition. The OP asks "Sure, it's a risk, but what would Daft Punk be if they weren't risk-takers?" as if Daft Punk haven't made two totally safe middle-of-the-road albums by this point. Can someone explain why "Giorgio by Moroder" is a funny track title? I don't get it. It's some sort of pun, right? Popcorn fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Apr 17, 2013 |
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Apr 17, 2013 17:35
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Oh right. I know Giorgio Moroder, but the syntax made it seem like it was some sort of twisted wordplay, like... Death by... Murder... or... North by Northwest or... something. You know, something like that. I'm extremely interested to hear what Daft Punk have done with live instrumentation. Although, interestingly, of everything we've heard of Get Lucky, the stereotypically Daft Punk vocoder bit is by far the catchiest.
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Apr 17, 2013 17:50
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I'm including the Tron soundtrack as an album. If you'd rather I didn't, pretend I said "releases" instead.
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Apr 17, 2013 18:00
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the black husserl posted:Human After All was the opposite of a safe album, you gotta be high to think it was the obvious choice. You're right actually. Tron's safe, HAA is a bunch of chafing loops and weird half-baked messes, which wasn't challenging exactly but hardly a safe bet either. it's just that it wasn't very good. I'm definitely on board with the "Alive 07 made sense of that album" team though. Tron, though, really was completely boring. I object to the (self-)mythologising of Daft Punk as shining beacons of daring and originality or whatever. Obviously I haven't heard this album yet and I'm not making any judgements about it, but on paper recreating 70s disco without actually sampling and manipulating it (ala Discovery) seems a more regressive than progressive philosophy. Very, very interested to hear how it works, and just how absent the electronica actually is. Popcorn fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Apr 17, 2013 |
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Apr 17, 2013 18:07
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e: ^^^^ ah, so it sounds like this is an early mix. it's real. The bridge where it's just the vocal with handclaps - for that to be fake, they would have had to somehow isolate the vocal from the clip we already have, without all the other stuff, w hich the faker could only do if they had access to the isolated stems of the real track which they can't. It's a fun, cool track, but yes the verses are surprisingly badly mixed, and the whole thing doesn't really go anywhere...
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Apr 17, 2013 18:28
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echronorian posted:This song is balls to the walls rad. Daft Punk is the best music to work out/bicycle to, can't wait for more of this! There's a tension between "pop" Daft Punk and "acid noise" Daft Punk. Homework proved they could loop grooves for minutes on end and have it rule. Discovery proved they could take loops and pace them with vocals and song structures to produce more conventional pop songs. Interestingly, HAA proved they could also fail at both. Some things work as static loops without development. Some things don't.
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Apr 18, 2013 04:16
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Nuclear Spy posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV2GA63HEGk that's shockingly boring and weird. I wonder what the live stuff will be like for this album, if they perform it at all. Considering the apparent emphasis on live instrumentation and all the collaborators involved, I wonder if they'll try a more traditional live performance model with collaborators hopping on stage when necessary, like the Gorillaz shows.
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Apr 20, 2013 15:08
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I've come to think Pharrell is the weak link in Get Lucky. It's not necessarily a problem with him or his performance, but the vocal melody is very bland. "Weeeeeee've... come too far..."
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Apr 24, 2013 18:46
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Colonel Whitey posted:Hmm, I actually really like the part you quoted. I think the verses about the Phoenix and stuff is the weak part. Yeah, they're weak too. I still think the song suffers from a lack of structure. It just kind of loops more than anything. Yes, I know Daft Punk have made a living of this, but this is clearly trying to be a conventional disco radio hit, and it would have benefited from a better structure, some more developed ideas and direction. BUT!! this is just the radio edit. The collab videos suggest there's at least a cooler intro to look forward to on the album version.
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Apr 24, 2013 22:30
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Whirlwind Jones posted:The fervor to which some people will defend this poo poo is crazy to me. It's astonishing. I've never seen anything like it for an album before, though I'm sure this isn't the worst the world's ever seen. Someone who went to the listening party posted their thoughts here - http://nialler9.com/first-listen-daft-punk-random-access-memories - and gave it a fairly negative review. Who knows if they're right or not, but the comments from people who haven't heard the album are hilarious: quote:Carl quote:Casey quote:Kch
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May 9, 2013 19:38
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This is a tasteless adult contemporary prog-disco disaster of an album with sparkling Disney production values. It sounds like early 90s Genesis.
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May 13, 2013 20:59
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I think it's mostly boring and cheesy, but if nothing else I'm impressed at how different it is. It makes me wonder why their first three albums were comparatively so similar-sounding. e: there's a lot of Glados autotune on this album. Not Daft Punk robot voices, but Glados robot voices. Popcorn fucked around with this message at 21:16 on May 13, 2013 |
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May 13, 2013 21:13
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The Walking Dad posted:Album has Phillip-Glass-Esque sounding material, straight up jazz, aboriginal sounding stuff, fantasia-esque soundscapes, classical strings, funk guitar, a myriad of drumming styles, Georgio Moroder. This album contains pretty much every style of music of the past 100 years in it for god's sake. the irony is that instead of making the album seem vibrant and experimental, it feels corny (in an uncool way) and sort of blandly soundtracky. Like I said before, it's very kind of 90s prog, when old masters from the 70 would come into the studio and go "wow, now I can make everything sound crystal clear!" and you had We Can't Dance on your hands.
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May 13, 2013 21:33
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Caseman posted:I love watching the reactions of people when a band releases an album that isn't exactly the same thing over and over. God forbid any creative group evolve at all. Yeah that's exactly what all the criticisms are saying. quote:Music should always be taken on its own terms first I agree.
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May 13, 2013 21:44
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If there are any Limmy fans in the house, he's doing a live review of the album here: http://www.justin.tv/brianlimond "The drums in Contact are no mad. They're drums. That's a man playing drums."
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May 13, 2013 22:48
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I think the best way I can express my dissatisfaction with this album is that it sounds like an album of session musicians. By that I don't mean "oh they collaborated with a lot of people and lost their purity" or anything nonsensical like that. I mean it sounds musically soulless and pristine, like a bunch of demo tracks designed to show off keyboards and drum kits in a guitar store.
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May 13, 2013 23:23
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I think possibly everyone should stop attempting to categorise everyone else's perspectives based on mysterious speculations about whether or not they were expecting the album to be good or not good or have only liked Daft Punk since Alive 2007 came out or if they have Earth Wind and Fire's Greatest Hits in their car.Colonel Whitey posted:It's this plus people trying to argue from a place of objectivity. It's never "I liked/disliked it because..." and it's always "this is great/terrible because..." And sometimes even the 'because' is left out entirely. Why do people get so upset when opinions are expressed without the "remember! this is my opinion!" disclaimer attached beforehand in bold? No one is pretending to be "objective" about anything. Yes, if I say an album sucks, I'm speaking only for myself: whose other opinion could I possibly be talking about? On my wedding day, when I tell everyone at wedding that my fiancee is the most beautiful girl in the world, are you going to jump up from behind a pew and scream "maybe in your opinion!!"?
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May 14, 2013 00:19
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You kids aren't ready for this album, but your dads are gonna love it.
Popcorn fucked around with this message at 16:20 on May 14, 2013 |
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May 14, 2013 15:26
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Intel&Sebastian posted:Alive2007 is the quintessential career celebration live album. It's so loving good it made people realize their most hated album (HAA) is actually a great album when you add a few things. This is such bizarre "praise" though. It depends on an acknowledging of HAA's failings. "Hey that kind of rubbishy half-baked album was actually pretty good once it was developed properly!" (as long as by "developed properly" you accept that means combining it with existing albums; it can only be understood in the terms of its superior predecessors apparently.)
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May 18, 2013 19:05
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"something incomplete" was always how I saw HAA. They had some great loops, they just didn't make any sense of them. Who didn't grin ear to ear at the opening minute of Robot Rock? Who didn't sigh when they realised that's the entire drat song?
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May 18, 2013 19:21
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Intel&Sebastian posted:I don't mind that the album was made in 6 weeks, but not telling anyone that kind of pertinent detail caused a lot of confusion, and I'm pretty sure in one of the pitchfork articles Thomas said he regretted stonewalling the press on that one. I dunno, what would telling the press in advance have done? "Lower your expectations, the album was done in a rush and no one's going to like it much"? Anyway, some great albums have been made in six weeks or less. Just not that one.
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May 18, 2013 21:52
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Pitchfork's score is the only one I ever pay attention to when albums come out. That's not because I need them to tell me what I like, but because they're the ultimate taste-setting kingmakers in the music world. It's like making an offering to the gods. e: to clarify further, I mean it's interesting to see how they respond to things, because they're the daddies of indie cred. Popcorn fucked around with this message at 02:54 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 02:44
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Cpt. Spring Types posted:Yeah, I don't usually like Pitchfork, but that's a really good review. Makes a lot of good points, and the reviewer has clearly spent a lot of time listening to it critically. Good stuff. Why do I get the impression people wouldn't think this if Pitchfork (boo hiss!) hadn't liked the album?
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May 20, 2013 18:24
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sethsez posted:If it were a negative review rather than a positive one it would be completely different, but hey, if it was still as well-written and considered as this one I'd like to think most people would still acknowledge it as a good review, even if it was one they disagreed with. I'd like to think so too, but people tend to praise/bash reviews (Pitchfork especially) based on how much their score reflects the listener's own tastes, rather than the quality of the journalism. But arts criticism isn't the same thing as reviewing electrical appliances. (e: I should retract my previous own snottiness though, there was no reason to accuse Spring Types of doing this.) It was a good review; the point about the potential elitism of Daft Punk's self-confessed philosophy is a very good one. I personally find their self-appointed mission to "bring life back to music" really weird and snotty. Thanks for saving music, Daft Punk (???). Popcorn fucked around with this message at 23:48 on May 20, 2013 |
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May 20, 2013 23:43
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thathonkey posted:One other weird thing... The chord progression/key (sorry not a music major) on Within and Instant Crush sound extremely similar to me... It almost had to be intentional to put them adjacent one another yet there is a long fade out and several moments of silence in between the two songs. It would have made a pretty awesome segue. At the end of Gorgio by Moroder the synth noise detunes until it's basically a regular kick drum sound. I was ready for that to form the basis for the next song but no. Segue denied.
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May 22, 2013 23:32
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When kids getting into Daft Punk 30 years from now realise that RAM isn't the one named Human After All they're going to be really confused.
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May 23, 2013 01:11
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The moving placement of the kick and the bass in the bar in Something About Us is a delight. A delight.
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May 25, 2013 14:52
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That's a really good point. The whole album is weirdly male-dominated now that I think about it, considering the number of collaborators. Some female voices would have been great.
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Jun 1, 2013 16:49
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Well, after a couple of weeks and a few more listens, the album... hasn't grown on me. It's still dramatically overlong, the production is still way too hygienic, and the songs are still, for all their production detail, underwritten. The only one I've come to particularly like is Instant Crush. Like other people have said, the line "take me, I don't wanna sing any more" is really affecting, and beautifully delivered. It's a rare moment of emotional resonance. But I hate the chorus, because the chord change jars every time. Datasmurf posted:I have to say, I do like NME's review of RAM. It's a pleasant read and I agree wholeheartedly with it. NME posted:Go out and rejoice: there’s something new under the sun. Ew, gross.
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Jun 2, 2013 11:09
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het posted:I think people who suggested this material would do better in future remixes are probably on the money, and that track is a definite example. A remix that scrubs Panda Bear out of Doin' It Right could be cool too. I think remixes could be great but I suspect they won't be. I'd love to see what Daft Punk would do if they took the interesting parts from it and sampled them to create a great new song, as they did with Harder Better or Digital Love... but I suspect Daft Punk have already done that with RAM itself, in their robot eyes. het posted:Man you need to work on internalizing people's arguments in a way that isn't dumbed-down-in-all-caps. Well, to be fair, you did seem to miss Rocco's point... it should be possible to have an opinion about something (whether it's positive or negative) and not have people accuse you of having no capacity for autonomous thought/belonging to some kind of conspiracy/whatever. The perceived quality of the Lost example has nothing to do with it.
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Jun 3, 2013 18:06
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Mahoning posted:This album hooked me though by seeming familiar (with the disco/Michael Jackson type sounds) while also being obviously new/different (vocoder, electronic sounds, etc). I hate to be a horrible pedantic jerk and everything but... what's new about these sounds?
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Jun 3, 2013 22:16
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Mahoning posted:Maybe I didn't mean "new" but instead "modern". Like I said...its newer to me since I've never been into this genre before. But by "new" I meant "not old" and by "not old" I meant "Not actually from the 70's" Yeah but all those electronic sounds are from 70s and 80s music too. That's what they have Giorgio Moroder talking about on the record.
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Jun 3, 2013 22:34
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Well sure and I'm not going to tell you to hate the album now or something... but the explicit point - message - of the album is that there's nothing new about it. It's nostalgia as an aesthetic. That's why the NME quote is so laughable. I don't mean to just pop up from behind a bush and snigger "YOU JUST SAID SOMETHING TECHNICALLY SLIGHTLY WRONG!!  " , but I think this is the defining identity of the work. Nothing in it is new, by design.
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Jun 3, 2013 23:06
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Mahoning posted:But the point is, just because something is designed to be of a certain era/genre does not separate it from the reality of the time in which it was created. To say it another way, you can try to mimic a certain style but never fully succeed because trends are a product of the time in which they're created. You cannot separate the two. No matter how hard he tries, Michael Buble is not Frank Sinatra and will never be confused for him. He is mimicking the style of Frank Sinatra but still creating something new (maybe its not the best example but it was off the top of my head). "Lose Yourself to Dance" may sound like some Michael Jackson/Jackson 5 song when it begins, but as soon as you hear "come on, come on, come on, come on..." you're instantly aware that this isn't a product of that era. An homage to an era can still be fresh and new. OK, I agree, in that nothing is ever completely new or completely non-new... but there is still a continuum of originality and RAM sits somewhere low on it. I don't rate RAM as something like the work of Tarantino, for example, who samples and remixes his sources in a style more comparable to, say, Discovery. As homage, RAM is very literal. I'd be interested in hearing about why I'm wrong about that; so far the examples of newness/differentation you've given are "electronics" and "vocoder", which is why I called you up on it in the first place. e: to expand further, I don't actually think the album suffers from being un-new, per se; I'm far more bothered by the lazy songwriting and lack of editing. But I resent the unprecedented cloud of hype that surrounds it, its self-proclaimed mission to "give life back to music", the fans and critics who are calling it new and brave, etc. Popcorn fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jun 3, 2013 |
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Jun 3, 2013 23:51
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The classic Daft Punk robot voice (eg Get Lucky) is done with a vocoder, I think, which uses the human voice as an input to modify envelopes and shape a synth sound (in the same way your mouth shapes noises made by your voicebox to create words). I suspect the more Glados-like vocals (eg Game of Love) were made with a tool called Melodyne, which works quite differently; you sing/speak whatever you want, and then pitch-shift the notes around as you like afterwards. What really foxes me is the vocal effect in Instant Crush. You can hear a dry Julian Casablancas 'underneath' the vocals, sounding low and throaty like he always does, but the main vocal is somehow processed to be an octave or two higher. What I don't understand is how they achieved that without getting a squeaky helium hamster voice effect. I'd really love to know, as I do consider it one of the less hackneyed sounds on the album.
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Jun 4, 2013 00:08
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Mahoning posted:I think you're disappointed by a lack of progress in the sounds or something. Actually I state exactly the opposite in my last post!
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Jun 4, 2013 01:29
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infinity2005 posted:I don't see what's interesting about the concept of 'robots singing' on an album that is purely dance music though? How does that concept affect the emotional value of the music at all? Well this is a weird question. How would having unaltered "human" singing affect the emotional value instead, in your eyes? How does using guitar instead of piano affect the emotional value? Etc? I think the robot voices are a tremendously valuable part of the Daft Punk sound, not just as part of an instantly recognisable trademark, but as an emotional tension. For example, on Harder Better Faster Stronger, the song builds and releases tension by escalating the complexity of the vocoder effect, "playing" the "voice" as not a voice but a lead instrument. Think about how that works with the lyrics, too; the robot is singing about working hard on what sounds like some sort of production line (?), starting off initially steady and workmanlike before finally spiralling into chaos, until its words are incomprehensible and the poor thing sounds like it’s having some sort of terrible breakdown. The best bit of Get Lucky (and RAM) does a similar trick of elaborating on a catchy vocoder line, but stops building it frustratingly early. Taking the opposite approach, the vocal in Instant Crush wouldn't seem so mournful and "trapped" without the manipulation. It (and the vocal is an 'it', not a he, not Julian Casablancas) sings "take it, I don't want to sing any more"... before a guitar solo manipulated to sound weirdly like a voice enters. The interplay in that moment is the only part of the album that really moves me. quote:Some people are reading a bit deep into a loving Daft Punk album (their weird pretentious comments doesn't help things).
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Jun 4, 2013 01:57
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It's also the Doobie Brothers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJe1iUuAW4M
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Jun 22, 2013 12:58
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Just listened to this album for the first time in ages. Georgio says "once you free your mind about a concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want, so nobody told me what to do, and there was no conception of what to do". Then it cuts to a really cliched orchestral harmony. Furious about this.
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Nov 10, 2013 03:22
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Random Access Memories isn't different enough.an skeleton posted:I interpreted that quote to mean, you do not need to play music in a way that is standard or already decided to be correct, but rather you may make your own system of music or harmony that reflects what you want to do/express. If taken literally, yes it is silly, obviously there are some concepts of music that are worthwhile to pay attention to. That's what he means, yes, but it's followed by a massive cliche, and it only exposes how naff and hackneyed the whole album actually is, despite implicitly purporting - via that quote and juxtaposition - to be daring.
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Nov 10, 2013 12:27
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