From the outset of their career, Daft Punk had the uncanny ability to attract a wide following from a rather specific genre. Their club-oriented debut Homework became a party staple not only for the club kids, but for music aficionados as well.
On Discovery, the Parisian duo left behind some of the house and brought more of the soul. They began focusing more on pop songs, which combined a tongue-in-cheek approach of late '70s R&B with rhythm derived from garage dance of the early '80s. The result was a contemporary classic not only in electronic music, but in mainstream music as well.
When tracks from their newest album, Human After All, leaked onto the Internet after a four-year wait the excitement was quickly undercut. Many thought the tracks were fake. It sounded as if a few frauds with a vocoder were playing a cruel joke on Daft Punk's fans. When the album was officially released, it turned out that those frauds were in fact Daft Punk themselves.
Human After All is a simple album almost to the point of minimalism. The songs do not have the same fullness of their earlier work, which doesn't necessarily make them inferior. \Prime Time Of Your Life"" favors a hollow, slow beat, which suits the songs eventual tempo shift in the outro. ""Steam Machines"" feature searing human vocals on top of an industrial beat to make the song sound like a fast-paced assembly line of funk. Both of these tracks and the album as a whole lie in a stylistic purgatory between full-on dance album and a chill-out album.
The two sentimental tracks, ""Make Love"" and ""Emotion,"" highlight the difficulty in appeasing both sensibilities. These tracks bog down the pace of the album and reduce it to plodding through repetitious vocals and melodies that are screaming to be built up to a huge climax that Daft Punk usually delivers.
There is another, harder-to-accept interpretation to the album that suggests Daft Punk is commenting on the banality of popular music-Human After All's self-consciousness lets it be so bad that it is good. This would assume that clich??d songs like ""Television Rules the Nation"" are lyrical and musical satires, which force the listener to evaluate the album on another, non-musical level.
This theory gives Daft Punk too much credit and only tries to rationalize how such a great band could release an average album.
Daft Punk's reputation may cloud fans' judgment in viewing this album as serious let-down. While there is nothing on here that equals the overall song quality of ""Digital Love"" or ""Face to Face,"" the hooks on tracks like ""Robot Rock"" are just as catchy as Daft Punk's best.
Fans willing to deal with a little repetition will enjoy Human After All, but casual listeners yearning to hear a club smash should look elsewhere-Discovery or Homework would be a good place to start.
