Review #4: Daft Punk

Daft Punk-“Human After All”
(Virgin)
5 out of 10

Picture links to Daft Punk's website and was nicked off geedorah.com

Oh, how I love Daft Punk with a passion. What unbelievable genius has come from these two man/musical robots by the heavenly names of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (How many musicians do you know that are worthy of FOUR NAMES?!?!?) They wrote the book on rave culture on 1997’s “Homework”, took a four year break and then wrote the book on pop music (or electro-pop balladeering, or even anime soundtracks if you prefer to get really specific) on 2001’s “Discovery”. Oh, the minds of these two genius things during these 4-5 years. Now, if you’ve been doing the math here, another four year break from 2001 brings our heroes to give us another nugget of auditory heaven in the year 2005 Anno Domini, which we just so happen to be engorged in as I type this. And, of course, we do get another…uh, interesting nugget from the boys.
Enter March 15, 2005. I get out of work on this day to find that my mum, fully knowing of my anticipation of this event, has already bought me a copy of this heralded disc, “Human After All”. Expecting the best, I eagerly open the CD and shove it in the CD player. The opening title track plays and I am simply giddy. This track gets me moving like the Daft jams of the past. Powered by what sounds like a cross between a howling guitar and a severely mangled vocal sample, the melody proceeds to habituate itself within the deep depths of my mind. For this five minutes and twenty seconds, I am floored with excitement. The bar is set high for the next track, “Prime Time Of Your Life”. The title suggests something much different from the song itself. The title of the song is sung in another mangled vocal sample backed by a fuzzy drum beat, a partnership that melts together to form an industrial symphony of humming and whirring that speeds up like an accelerating train. Not very Daft of you, my friends, but I’ll take it. Something fresh and different, I figure.
That optimism would fall rapidly into a pool of disappointment for the rest of the experience, starting with “Robot Rock”, which has become, by a staggering stroke of idiocy, the first single. Another title singing vocal sample. For the first and certainly not the last time in the disc, repetition makes a guest appearance. It even came complete with terrible guitar.
Another saddening trend in the disc is that there’s a shocking influence of industrial rock here. “Steam Machine” sounds like a bad Nine Inch Nails track, and I’m not even fond of Mr. Reznor’s work. “The Brainwasher” loops a headbanging rhythm that’s seemingly entertaining, yet still fairly depressing. “Television Rules The Nation” has a similar effect. To throw salt in these painful wounds, they just had to try to reproduce their best track, “Harder Better Faster Stronger”, in the absurd “Technologic”.
Oh, it doesn’t stop there. You may have remembered the ballads on “Discovery”, you know, the ones with great vocals from Daft Punk and Romanthony that conveyed an innocent naïveté in the subject of love? Forget about that. There are two stabs at ballads here, “Make Love” and “Emotion”. Instead of making our heart melt while we shake our collective badonkadonks like you did on “Discovery”, why don’t you guys just take a couple of your little NIN-inspired tracks and slow them down! Great job! You’re really making me want to cuddle with someone now!
Seriously though, these two tracks are probably the most tragic of anything in their entire catalogue, or possibly even anything they have ever done in any field anywhere in their whole entire lives. “Make Love” does not make me want to make love, it just makes me want to skip past five minutes of lazy piano. Even worse, “Emotion” does not evoke one single emotion, instead it makes me end the disc prematurely so that I don’t have to endure SEVEN MINUTES of the song title being looped once again.
Thankfully, the boys have issued an explanation/subtle apology in the liner notes, and I quote: “Paris, September 13 to November 9, 2004.” Do the math there. If this is when the disc was recorded, that means it took roughly three weeks to create it. Three weeks! This small fragment of information puts images in my mind of the duo recording songs at 3 A.M. in a bleak apartment, possibly depressed. I may be wrong, true, but this is just my mental image. If you take four years off and take three weeks to record a disappointing album, it really makes me question what the world you’ve been doing for the past 3 years and 49 weeks. This also gives the album a higher score then it would have been had it taken longer to record since the first two tracks are pretty damn good, and to create two cracking tracks in three weeks when you may be in a terrible mental condition is an impressive achievement.
I end with these words: Thomas and Guy-Manuel, sort everything out and start coming up with ideas for 2009. And if you really need to, don’t hesitate to call that Romanthony guy!

Key Tracks: "Human After All", "Prime Time Of Your Life"