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Celeb News: Daft Punk: 87 Metacritic/Review scores.
Member Since: 8/23/2011
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Daft Punk: 87 Metacritic/Review scores.
Metacritic: http://www.metacritic.com/music/rand...ries/daft-punk
New Musical Express (NME), Original Score: 100/100
By assembling a cast of their favourite musicians and delving into their adolescent memories, Daft Punk have created something as emotionally honest as any singer-songwriter confessional--and a lot more fun to dance to.
Pretty Much Amazing, Original Score: 100/100
It took exuberance, painstaking detail, and wide-eyed nostalgia for Daft Punk to create Random Access Memories, their best.
The Telegraph (UK), Original Score: 100/100
Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.
Entertainment Weekly, Original Score: 100/100
It's a headphones album in an age of radio singles; a bravura live performance that stands out against pro forma knob-twiddling; a jazzy disco attack on the basic house beat; a full collaboration at a time when the superstar DJ stands alone. It's also quite moving; melancholy runs through every song.
Review
Let's play one final bass-drop requiem in memory of EDM. If the genre hasn't already been wub-wub-wub'd to death, Daft Punk would like to smother it with its own spirit hoodie. True, the duo's Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo helped spawn this new wave of harder, faster, stronger dance music — but lately, they've been slagging off that scene for its lack of imagination and its overreliance on preset sounds. Of course, that only makes Random Access Memories, their first proper album in eight years, feel more like a revelation: It features no electronics except for a modular synthesizer and some vintage vocoders, and uses only one sample. (A snippet from the Sherbs' ''We Ride Tonight'' opens the final track, ''Contact.'') Recorded in the studio with an orchestra, a children's choir, and an all-star cast that includes Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers, Julian Casablancas, Panda Bear, and Giorgio Moroder, it's a headphones album in an age of radio singles; a bravura live performance that stands out against pro forma knob-twiddling; a jazzy disco attack on the basic house beat; a full collaboration at a time when the superstar DJ stands alone. It's also quite moving; melancholy runs through every song.
As the title suggests, RAM explores the way that memory is stored — on a hard drive or in your brain. Nostalgia is a major theme here, both in the music, which celebrates disco (first single ''Get Lucky''), funk (''Give Life Back to Music''), and classic sci-fi soundtracks (''Contact''), and in the lyrics, which often feature men of a certain age reckoning with the past. ''Giorgio by Moroder'' begins with the disco godfather recalling the days when he stayed out all night and slept in his car, while the music vividly evokes each decade he describes, building from a dramatic string section to record-scratching to a synth-pop finale that plays out like an epic laser-tag game. Later, Todd Edwards wants to ''feel like I'm 17'' on the pedal-steel daydreamer ''Fragment of Time,'' and the wistful ''Touch'' finds Paul Williams looking back on young love: ''I remember touch,'' he sighs through a vocoder, as spaceship sounds fire off. ''You've given me too much to feel/ You've almost convinced me I'm real.'' You don't know whether you’re supposed to imagine him playing a sad HAL 9000 or a lonely astronaut. And maybe that's the point: It's hard to tell the difference between people and machines in dance music these days. But if EDM is turning humans into robots, Daft Punk are working hard to make robot pop feel human again. A
Review
It may be hard to imagine a lecture whipping up a storm on a dance floor but Daft Punk somehow pull it off on Giorgio by Moroder. As a relaxed backing track of loping bass, chinking guitar and light drums coalesces into a Studio 54 mid-tempo shimmy, the voice of the pioneering Italian disco producer can be heard discussing his own musical journey to find “the sound of the future”. Just when you’re wondering if you should be dancing or taking notes, the track blasts forward to a snaky synth weave and banging beat, hitching a Moroder-style hypnotic groove to pulsing 21st-century club dynamics.
French duo, Thomas Bangalter, 38, and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, 39, are among the prime architects of the Nineties techno-electro-club-pop sound that has belatedly colonised American pop. Yet the duo themselves appear unimpressed. Bangalter recently commented that “computers are not really music instruments” and it is “too easy to make the same music you hear on the radio”. Concentrating on movie soundtracks and live sets, Daft Punk haven’t released an original studio album in seven years.
Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade. In an effort to invoke the inspiration of records they used to sample, the duo have built tracks up with live musicians, notably collaborating with Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, whose slick, syncopated rhythm slices shine amid the plush synthesizers.
Give Life Back to Music and Lose Yourself to Dance offer a perfect updating of disco pleasures, while the gorgeous melody of The Game of Love captures that mood of bittersweet melancholy where dancing offers a fleeting escape from the heartbreaks of life. Yet for all its retro references, RAM is far from a slavish homage, reaching towards the past through the digitally manipulative context of contemporary club culture. Daft Punk have the knack of knowing when to shift gear, so that tracks constantly mutate. Over 72 minutes of wild and wayward explorations, they embrace chugging new wave rock, sleek soul, cocktail lounge crooning and Dixieland jazz but there’s nothing here to scare kids off the dance floor.
Moroder wanted to bring together “the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and the future”. Daft Punk add the Eighties, Nineties and Noughties to the mix. If this is the future, count me in.
Q Magazine, Original Score: 100/100
Daft Punk's best album in a career that's already redefined dance music at least twice. It is, in short, a mind-blower.
[Jun 2013, p.88]
Exclaim, Original Score: 100/100
This is the album on which Daft Punk are truly and convincingly "human after all." And on this toweringly grand achievement, they've never sounded better.
All Music Guide, Original Score: 90/100
Random Access Memories is also Daft Punk's most personal work, and richly rewarding for listeners willing to spend time with it.
This Is Fake DIY, Original Score: 90/100
Random Access Memories is, for all the DJ-on-camera dancing hype, an album in the proper sense of the word; these aren't thirteen dancefloor ready bangers, it's a grandiose statement of intent.
Pitchfork, Original Score: 88/100
The record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.
Under the Radar, Original Score: 85/100
In the first half especially the format of fast song/slow song/fast song/slow song is adhered to a little too rigidly and, while the individual tracks are fantastic, it feels a little disjointed.
The A.V. Club, Original Score: 83/100
The album is nonetheless an entrancing and endlessly entertaining musical experience, a fun collection that can soundtrack a great party from start to finish, but also rewards the focused listener with a collage of fascinating quirks.
Boston Globe, Original Score: 80/100
There’s definitely an epic heft to it, aided by a deep, varied bench of guest talent.
No Ripcord, Original Score: 80/100
What Daft Punk have done on Random Access Memories could be seen as a methodically curated, musical museum of the future, rather than a conservatory for experimental collaboration.
Consequence of Sound, Original Score: 80/100
Random Access Memories proves that Daft Punk remain masters of their domain, who defend their array of superlatives because of, rather than in spite of, unconventional sound choices.
Spin, Original Score: 80/100
They're not robots, they're "robots." They "rock" and want you to "dance." In that sense, this is absolutely in keeping with the band's legacy. It is theater: absolutely sincere and totally fake.
The Guardian, Original Score: 80/100
Its flaws are outweighed by moments that justify the excitement. It felt like a major event before its release: more incredibly, it still does once you've heard it.
Fact Magazine (UK), Original Score: 80/100
As long as you’re prepared to accept that it’s a Hollywood production inspired more by Steely Dan and California highways than Cajmere and French basements, then Random Access Memories is a treat.
Billboard.com, Original Score: 80/100
Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have made an analog album that's less of a "throwback" and more of a salute to the idols that would now do anything to hop on the duo's full-length.
Rolling Stone, Original Score: 80/100
At times, the album is a victim of its own ambition. But it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower.
Review:
French duo Daft Punk helped create our current stadium-shaking, Coachella-dominating dance-music moment, and their new album is by far the year's most anticipated EDM set. The only issue is that it sounds almost nothing like EDM.
Random Access Memories is full of WTF moments: Julian Casablancas delivering maybe the most emotive vocals of his career through a vocoder-style haze; dance godfather Giorgio Moroder waxing nostalgic on an electro-jazz-funk epic; pop-schmaltz guru Paul Williams ("We've Only Just Begun") playing a love-starved cyborg in a disco fantasia. Then there's the full package - a 70-minute-plus, over-the-top concept LP of prog-rocking, reverse-engineered dance music orbiting somewhere between Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and Earth, Wind and Fire's That's the Way of the World.
It's a long way from Homework, the 1997 debut on which Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo perfected a brand of synth-and-sample-centered house music that rebooted Eurodisco and inspired acts from Kanye West to Swedish House Mafia. But plenty has happened since: EDM has gone megapop, while DP, following a 2007 stadium tour, repaired to L.A. to rethink their game.
Random Access Memories reflects all this. Like ex-smokers turned anti-tobacco militants, Daft Punk have been disparaging EDM in the press, and without forsaking their Kiss-like robot personae, they've built a record more or less wholly on live instrumentation. Its brilliance is often irrefutable - like when the exquisitely funky rhythm guitar of Nile Rodgers flickers through "Get Lucky" and "Lose Yourself to Dance," or when studio grandmasters Omar Hakim and John JR Robinson create godhead break beats apparently using drumsticks instead of loop triggers (see the prog-rock freakout "Contact").
There's a narrative here, too, although in concept-album tradition, it's a vague one. The processed vocals unspool a story that suggests cyborgs striving to be human - pretty much the story of all of us these days. On "Touch," Williams trade drama-queen verses with a cyber-chorus, like some alternate ending to Dave Bowman's standoff with HAL, the computer, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's completely ridiculous. It's also remarkably beautiful and affecting. So goes much of the record. Verses approach the banal; old-school-production treacle is laid on thick, but the creative soul is palpable. The jazz fusion gestures conjure ecstatic disco history as well as cheesy wine-bar soundtracks. And the absence of "modern" club beats is striking. This is not a record for the average Electric Daisy Carnival goer.
But maybe that's the point. A sort of Portrait of the Artists as Grown-Ass Ravers, this is Daft Punk conjuring the musical era that first inspired them, when disco conquered the world with handcrafted grooves and prog-rock excess magnified emotions in black-lit bedrooms. At times, the album is a victim of its own ambition. But it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower.
The Independent (UK), Original Score: 80/100
Like their Discovery LP which laid fresh pathways for pop and dance in 2001, Random Access Memories breathes life into the safe music that dominates today’s charts, with its sheer ambition.
Drowned in Sound, Original Score: 70/100
After the sometimes frustrating, frequently exhilarating journey, the thrilling, head-shattering, Captain Eugene Cernan-sampling 'Contact', manned by DJ Falcon, simply soars.
The Fly, Original Score: 70/100
Not a great leap forwards, then, but a welcome throwback nonetheless.
Slant Magazine, Original Score: 70/100
RAM is an album that ultimately comes off having more respect for its spiritual predecessors than its listeners.
musicOMH, Original Score: 60/100
On paper these might sound like mad genius, but Daft Punk somehow misplace the wit and the light touch that’s pretty much their trademark. Instead, these long epics become somewhat tedious and there is a strong whiff of egoism and self-indulgence.
Clash Music, Original Score: 60/100
Credit to the original OP, Lil Misty
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Banned
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ROLLING STONE FINALLY GOT POSTED
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Member Since: 5/10/2012
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Coming for that 80+ score.
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Banned
Member Since: 11/24/2009
Posts: 61,404
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for future reference
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Banned
Member Since: 3/22/2012
Posts: 26,321
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So far ='s 82 but I think some reviewers are counted with more consideration idr
It's and 82, even with the fly review
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Member Since: 6/1/2010
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Has this leaked yet? "Get Lucky" has grown on me a bit.
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Banned
Member Since: 3/22/2012
Posts: 26,321
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No, only a bad quality recording snip of "Giorgio By Moroder" leaked.
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Banned
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Member Since: 2/1/2010
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the King of Pop's influence is all over this album MJ his influence
Daft Punk
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Member Since: 6/2/2011
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Discovery got somewhat mixed reviews when it was released and now it's considered a modern classic, while Human After All was panned upon release and is now regarded as "experimental and raw" and not a bad album at all. Take these reviews with a grain of salt.
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Banned
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they never learn
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Banned
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Quote:
Originally posted by Stephen
musicOMH
Can't wait for Pitchfork, AV Club and Consequence of Sound
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Pitchfork will give it a 7.4 mark my words
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Banned
Member Since: 3/14/2012
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get lucky is their first song that i heard and I'm hyped about their album now
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Member Since: 6/16/2006
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hopefully this one is better and more cohesive than Discovery.
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Member Since: 6/20/2011
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Quote:
Originally posted by Lil Misty
Pitchfork will give it a 7.4 mark my words
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Pitchfork will give it a 10.0 because they're nothing more than a glorified hype machine mark my words.
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Banned
Member Since: 3/22/2012
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Bye Hipsterfork hates Daft Punk
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Member Since: 8/1/2012
Posts: 4,779
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Quote:
Originally posted by Lil Misty
Pitchfork will give it a 7.4 mark my words
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this
they're building up hype just to give them a 7.4 pan of the century like they did with animal collective
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
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Everything I hear about the style of the album sounds amazing.
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Banned
Member Since: 3/22/2012
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The hipsters seem to dislike this record for not having enough Nile/Dance
okay
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