Released May 17, 2013
8.5 / 10
Favorites
The Game of Love, Giorgio by Moroder, Instant Crush (feat. Julian Casablancas), Touch (feat. Paul Williams), Contact
Least favorites
Lose Yourself to Dance (feat. Pharrell Williams), Doin' it Right (feat. Panda Bear)
One of the most anticipated releases of 2013 conveyed an eerie feeling that music needed to go back in time to dig up what it had lost since the age of the album format. In "Random Access Memories" French house duo Daft Punk pay tribute to sounds, techniques and motifs of the 70s and early 80s with tremendous effort into working out the smallest details. Seemingly, no expense was spared in the making of the album - all but one track rely on live instrumentation instead of sampling. The guitars are crisp, the drums snap and the bass overflows in this 13 track affair. Also worth mentioning are "RAM"'s forgotten star players John JR Robinson and Omar Hakim at the drums - the former is best known for his work with Quincy Jones, including on Michael Jackson's "Off the Wall" and Omar has played alongside greats the like of David Bowie, Sting, Madonna, Miles Davis and Celine Dion. This time around Daft Punk have a lot to say about connection and they made sure the world would hear it. A lot - good and bad alike - has been said of the impact and relevance of the album when it came out but I feel the album fell prey to the high expectations surrounding its release - many reviews and commentary of the time tried a bit too hard to exploit the piece's weaknesses and present them as nearly fatal, ultimately underestimating the accomplishment that is "RAM".
Touch, the middle point of "RAM" embodies many of the album's singular characteristics. The track opens on an extraterrestrial note, announcing the dawning of a new journey. After a verse that builds up apprehension, it resounds through space with disco charm and piercing cymbals in a joyous fever of horns and strings.Touch rings overly dramatic at times, playing with accelerations, decelerations, aggregation of chaos and its deconstruction. Vocoded voices resonate through the space created by the arrangement and are quickly followed by a child choir, repeating the words "Hold on, if love is the answer, you're home" - words that strike as sounding ridiculous in some places and befitting in others. The opus is an emotional rollercoaster - at its most chilling, worthy of your state of the art horror picture and, at its most cheerful, not unlike your typical upbeat exuberant anime soundtracks. In Touch, Daft Punk successfully blend in absurdity, over the top melodies and brilliant emotional creativity. The twin tracks destined to reach the masses before other songs make it on people's radars are among the lighter ones - coincidentally both featuring Pharrell and legendary guitarist Nile Rodgers. Lose Yourself to Dance opens with a luxuriant instrumental but loses its appeal quickly as it fails to re-invigorate interest in nodding along to a song supposedly asking us to relinquish control and go crazy to a mellow beat and contained melodies. The huge gap between the lyrical expectations and the canvas it provides to fulfill those is particularly remarkable in the song's music video where crowds losing themselves to dance consists of awkward hand clapping (also part of the cheesy sonics) and polite head nodding. On the other hand, Get Lucky's groove is still truly infectious despite having been over-played on the airwaves after it came out. Pharrell is given much more space to show personality and do his thing - whereas on Lose Yourself to Dance his input feels pretty anonymous and lifeless. Upwards of six minutes long, it is a quite a feat that the song made it to the top of the charts. An incredibly effective and fun song that breathes a little levity into "RAM". Additionally, something has to be said for how dramatic "RAM" is. With the grand opening of intro track Give Life Back to Music to the crashing conclusion of Contact the album is certainly bookended by theatrical moments. The first track of the album is a groovy one, featuring a background flare that comes and goes, entwining guitars and orchestral surges. The combination of disco with progressive pop rock makes for a vibrant exalted song tinted with nostalgia. Still, Give Life Back to Music doesn't compare to Giorgio by Moroder as a dramatic exhibition. The third track of "RAM" rises and falls like crashing waves, a befitting tribute to a pioneering figure of the disco and electronic music scene. The song comes full circles as it ends on the "click" Giorgio talks about right before the song launches into higher gears. Another striking instance of Daft Punk's dramatic flair occurs in Beyond. The track starts with a dense orchestral presence that grows fiercer before it collapses, silencing the boasting horns, the stringent strings and the rumbling percussions to give way to a simpler melody guided by a rich bass. Beyond also offers some of the album's deepest lyrical content alongside commonplace tropes - "You are the end and the beginning / A world where time is not allowed". It's cheesy but I'll have some bread with it and be perfectly content. The theatrics of "RAM" are undoubtedly a means to an end. They support great storytelling through arrangements and melody without forcing synopses down your throats with lyrical guidance. The album feels like a journey of journeys as most tracks create their own paths within a larger frame. Giorgio by Moroder embarks on a voyage before Giorgio's speech comes to a close, mimicking the technique he mentions before kicking off. The track feels a lot like its different layers are all marching towards a common goals revolving in their own patterns, somehow finding each other over and over again and pacing themselves as to not leave a soldier behind - not competing for first place yet not perfectly aligned either. They take detours through passages of jazz improvisation but Giorgio's bridge declares the rejuvenation of the musical fabric with dazzling melancholia breaking into unstable grandioso equilibrium that disintegrates in chaos. In many ways Giorgio by Moroder is the story of a star that forms from the aggregation of particles assembled by gravity and once it reaches a critical density, caves in, into a black hole from which no sound can escape. The spaceship travels through various up and downs until Motherboard takes over, an epic itself. The track mesmerizes with flutes and agile percussions, fueling a rush on an eerie background. A reverie comes to life with breathtaking arrangements. At some point the melody becomes untangled and struggles as if sucked into quicksands in a flash. Production suddenly ramps up during the fight to break free before turning to muted instruments and an ominous air that leave the listener aghast. Is it the end? No, the melody finds new wind and breaks away from what was holding it back. Quite the cinematic composition, ending on raining sound and bubbling, breaking away from the strictly evocative nature of "RAM". Also worth noting how much the sonics of Motherboard remind me of Rone's earlier work. The final voyage Daft Punk take us on is closing track Contact. There's nothing like starting with an astronaut sample from Apollo 17 to make the space analogy more explicit. After the recording comes a gloomy instrumental that propels the song into full speed. The track trips on itself in a final cathartic race towards the end of the album. It has a very celebratory ring to it. This track climaxes repeatedly, getting more and more intense, releasing all the pent-up energy of "RAM". The sizzle and thumping after the first acceleration phase are one of the nicer touches on the track. The alien sounds Contact ends on suggest Daft Punk launched into space on another journey. They'll be away for a while as they gather new material from outer space. It's been seven years, they should be back anytime now. Here's to hoping they make it back in time to breathe new life into a music industry threatened by the pandemic that is bound to leave visible scars if and when it passes!
Favorite lyrics
"The perfect song is framed with silence It speaks of places never seen Your home's a promise long forgotten It is the birthplace of your dreams"
Beyond
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