236. Daft Punk, "Discovery"

 

Going from Red Headed Stranger to this is more than a little jarring, like jumping from the hot tub into the pool, if the pool was electrified and French and heavily Autotuned.  (I actually accidentally jumped from RHS to tomorrow's entry, then had to backtrack, but you get the idea.)  Even I, the Old Guy Who Knows Nothing About Electronic Music, know that this was a hugely influential and important album, even if I did not know until yesterday that it was New York garage house or French house or maybe post-disco?  I guess I thought everything that came after disco was post-disco but apparently that's not what that means?  Anyway.

First song, first side, is "One More Time," a song I became intimately familiar with since it was on Pitchfork's Best Songs of the 2000s (in fact, it was number 5!), and I made a Spotify playlist of the top 30 songs on the list that I listened to almost nonstop in early 2010.  (Just a quick detour here to say that the list is so good that it makes me think the 2000s might have been one of the best eras of music of all time - the top 10 includes "Get Ur Freak On" and "Maps" and "Paper Planes" and "All My Friends," wow.)  It's a fun song, probably better suited for ecstatic (in all senses of the word) dancing than listening on headphones while typing.  The next song, "Aerodynamic," starts off with a clanging church bell and then dives into a straight groove and then has some wild Eddie VH-style guitar solo?  Crazy, man.  

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" won the Grammy for Best Dance Song in 2009 and it's not hard to see why, it's a total banger, with a sinister underlying message of mindless obediance:

Work it harder, make it better
Do it faster, makes us stronger
More than ever, hour after
Hour, work is never over

It might be the best-known Daft Punk song, partially helped, I'm sure, by Kanye's use of the song in his song "Stronger" on Graduation.

I think my favorite is "Digital Love," the third track, which is disco-pop?  Is that a thing?  It's definitely poppy, which always gets me.  Fun song.  "Face to Face" is also a nice electro-pop song, if you're into that kind of thing.

Speaking of Pitchfork, this album was one of the ones included in the Great Rescoring of 2021, where they went back and cleaned up reviews in hindsight, elevating this album from its original 6.4 to a 10.  This is one of the things I've touched on here before; sometimes it's impossible to know the impact of an album when it first comes out.  Rescoring is a good thing!  This album looks a lot better now that it's influenced so much.  Good for it.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Oh, certainly.

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