295. Daft Punk, "Random Access Memories"

 


You cannot kill disco, you can only make it stronger and angrier.  On this album, EDM superstars Daft Punk turned their icy gaze to one of the most unfairly maligned genres in music.  The result is a fantastic sounding album, but I don't know if the songs entirely work for me.  

The first thing you notice is that the music sounds live - like I was listening and I thought "this can't be a drum machine, it sounds too real" - and turns out DP brought in studio musicians to record a lot of it.  There's a lot of vocoder, of course, although blessedly 70's songwriting icon Paul Williams gets to sing "Touch," which he co-wrote, in his own voice.  Guess who else shows up?  Our Strokes buddy Julian Casablancas, singing unrecognizably altered vocals on "Instant Crush."  It occurs to me that the Strokes could rockify that song and it would be better than a lot of the Strokes' later catalogue.

Of course you are aware of "Get Lucky," which was absolutely everywhere in the summer of 2013.  When I first started reading about it (before I actually heard of it), I could only think of the Heatmiser song "Get Lucky" which is, um, a different song in every way.  But DP's "Get Lucky" has plenty to recommend it as well.  Infectiously bouncy, great vocal by Pharrell Williams, sparkling production.  Nile Rodgers played the guitar part, which DP liked so much that they then re-recorded everything else around it.

In fact, this whole album just sounds amazing.  It's crystal clear and bright and shiny and crisp.  That being said, I can't see listening to it a ton.  It's great and I'm sure people love it, it's just not for me, I guess.

Also, there should ABSOLUTELY be a DP album in the Top 500 but this one?  I'm not sure.  Maybe our old pal recency bias acting up again.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Maybe not? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip hop"
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th
Read more