Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 02/05/06
Label: Virgin

Think of Daft Punk and think of filtered robot house for dancefloors from The Rex to the local Ritzty. Somehow, their combination of NY garage beats, Chicago house and techno textures successfully reconfigured the American template, transforming it to such an extent that, in Chicago at least, they're still lost. Perhaps, Parisian duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo's pre-Daft Punk dabblings with rock were the catalyst for their unorthadox take on what was, upon their emergence in '96, a severely segregated dance scene. (Long before LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy was the "first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids.")

Either way, we should have guessed that if anyone would successfully 'deconstruct' house, it would be the French. Initially, the elements were clear. The drums on "Homework" sounded like Cutting Vinyl releases by Louie Vega and Todd Terry. In fact, Vega's Masters At Work can be credited with defining much of the basics of the Daft Punk aesthetic on mid-'90s tracks like "The Bounce" and "What A Sensation". Tight, punchy and robotic and yet deeply funky, Daft Punk brought the swing of NY garage to bear on a much less soulful party groove, one that made its affection for the unapologetic bliss-out of the dancefloor amply clear on tracks like "Alive" and "Rollin' And Scratchin'". Compared to their soul jazz-reared NY cousins, Daft Punk have never been afraid to play it hard, hunched over a Roland TB-303 tweaking like German acid freaks Hardfloor, on better drugs.

Just before the halfway point, this album documents Daft Punk's transformation into disco robots, brought on by Bangalter's massive success with Stardust. By the time they released "Discovery", house was in decline and the musical language that once appeared borrowed from club culture had become their own. Undeniably brilliant producers, the mysterious duo who scrupulously disguised their identities were now even better concealed, beneath machine-tooled irony and pastiche. The raw 'music: response' dynamic of rave would no longer do and so they planned and plotted their every musical gesture, sanded and polished the results until they were unimpeachable and yet curiously unmoving.

After another four-year wait, "We Are Human", just wasn't enough. Attempting to bypass the soulless studio toil and recapture the essence of "Homework" by recording the LP in just six weeks, they succeeded only in sounding a little jaded and very short on ideas. But this is "Vol. 1" of a greatest hits package so there's more to come. Certainly, they couldn't be in a more fertile period for their chosen art-form with every release on European labels like Bpitch, Mobilee and Raum more essential than the last. Perhaps its time for the robots to report back to a darkened dancefloor.

    by James Poletti