![]() They amassed a band of engineers who would keep pace with Bangalter’s cultured ear (“the best in the business,” says DJ Falcon, despite lingering hearing damage sustained from a misfiring speaker in 2002), then spent years rotating between premium studios-including one, Henson B, that required an enormous crystal to be spotlit 24/7 because the ghost of Karen Carpenter was said to lay within. Bangalter, de Homem-Christo, and their creative director (or, according to those closest to the nerve center, silent third member), Cédric Hervet, were in agreement: Pro Tools, plug-ins-anything their clubworld peers might avail themselves of had to be ditched unless unavoidable. Midway through Alive 2006-07, the tour that reshaped live electronic music's potential, they hatched a plan to pivot sharply. The plan for RAM materialized at a point when Daft Punk’s stock seemingly couldn’t go any higher. Among not only their team but also a small auditorium’s worth of affiliates, the same giddy perspective recurs uncoerced: They were all nestled in the belly of a magnificent Trojan Horse bedazzled with Hedi Slimane sequins, knocking at the gates of the big leagues. Having conducted extensive interviews about the duo’s universal influence for a forthcoming book, After Daft, I was surprised by how much was left to discover about one of modern pop’s most pored-over records. The next installment in a post-dissolution push to gild their legacy, Random Access Memories (10th Anniversary Edition) supplies 35 minutes worth of unheard or hard-to-acquire bonus material, as well as a wormhole back to 2013-an era of buzz, naivete, and fortune-cookie wisdom that good times can last not just all night, but forever. This was an undeniable event record, but does the lore supersede the songs themselves? Where Homework and Discovery teem with eternal youth, RAM’s unyielding devotion to the past can fix it in time. RAM is slow, it’s said, a long 75 minutes the airlocked grooves are linear and the opening run sags under the weight of treacle. Yet Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s fourth and no-fooling final album is their only one to see its reputation stall, or even backslide when put under scrutiny-unlike the rest, which all traveled from varying shades of skepticism to being regarded as either significant, genius, or both. 2," which includes spaghetti-Western guitar, a repeating sample of the '60s Italian pop singer Mina and a lyric that quotes Abba's "Dancing Queen." Mamma mia, it's marvelous.Random Access Memories, which swept into homes 10 years ago on the back of the most fulsome rollout imaginable, arrived with “Classic!” practically etched into the lacquer. The best of the slow tunes is the album's seven-minute centerpiece, "When I Was Cruel No. "Tear Off Your Own Head," "Dissolve" and "Daddy Can I Turn This?" also sound great loud. The opening cut, the autobiographical "45," could pass as an outtake from his first album, and that's high praise. He wrote all 15 songs with a Silvertone electric guitar and 15-watt amplifier and the approach produced a handful of handsome tunes with "rowdy rhythm," as he calls it. When I Was Cruel, his first solo album since 1996's All This Useless Beauty, ranks with his best work in the past couple of decades. Like his namesake, the British Elvis started strong, sank into a slump and then mounted a career comeback.
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