RANDOM ACCESS MEMORIES

In the electronica landscape of the 1990s, Daft Punk first came over as a novelty. Funny band name, funny sound, funny masks, and a funny (and incredibly fun) hit called “Da Funk”, found on their debut album, Homework. They've come a long way since, but the playfulness remains, and so does their ability to surprise. Ballads, Jazzy interludes, Low BPMs, Live drums, An Andrew Lloyd Webber moment - These things don't often figure in discussions of Daft Punk.  Random Access Memories, their fourth studio album, is one of the most fiercely anticipated releases of the year. Interest in the Parisian androids reached a febrile thrum earlier this year when Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers, Julian Casablancas and Panda Bear were revealed as guests in a campaign of drip-fed information which peaked with a glitter bombshell: Get Lucky. This retro-futurist funk masterpiece is now the biggest hit of Daft Punk's career.

RAM is has been released into a cultural climate in which electronic dance music – that bogus canned stuff made by effete, metrosexual Europeans, or so what the majority of the population thought – has finally been embraced by the masses.

Just as electronic dance music is having its day, however, RAM wrong-foots preconceptions of what a new Daft Punk album might be – squelchy, chic, made on computers, by robots – with the agility of an amyl-assisted mountain goat. This is a 13-track, 80-minute love letter to synthetic music and dancing in which many of the pillars of electronic club music are rooted. Only one song features samples. Contact begins with Apollo mission astronaut Gene Cernan reporting a UFO sighting, and features a lift from Australian band the Sherbs before closing the album with a spectacular wig-out that demands head-banging, not merely boogie wooging.
Throughout, the strings on RAM are made of catgut, not 1s and 0s; human orchestras as well. On Fragments of Time there may even be a lap steel guitar sighing. RAM's sound design is less indebted to techno and house than to funk and soft rock, for both good and ill. We actually get lucky twice. The single's twin is called Lose Yourself to Dance and it nags even harder, with handclaps, a stereo pan of robots urging "c'mon, c'mon" and Pharrell Williams offering you his shirt to mop up the sweat.

There is a bit of sad robot-muzak here, some cheesy (The Game of Love), some of it effective (Beyond). Touch, meanwhile, is a collaboration with songwriter Paul Williams (the Carpenters, the Muppets), providing little more than a mid-album experiment. No such reservations greet Giorgio By Moroder, a triumph of updated retro synthetics that begins as a dinner party chat with the famous bassline architect. It expands into a series of movements in which a vintage early synth melody gives way to climax after climax, where real and electronic parts compete for dominance.

It is hard to believe now that Daft Punk's stock as innovators had plateaued somewhat, given the relatively muted response to 2005's Human After All and their Tron soundtrack. With RAM – a masterpiece complete with flaws – Daft Punk have shone a laser beam into dark corners of the 70s and 80s and made them sing again, with timbres more human than ever before. Most of all, they wanted to create an album-album, a series of songs that could take the listener on a trip, the way LPs were supposedly experienced in another time.