Daft Punk – Random Access Memories Album Review (Columbia Records)

Daft Punk
Random Access Memories
Columbia RecordsWant to know about the world's largest living organism? How about the man with the third highest Donkey Kong score? Need the formula for the area of a circle? All of these things and literally every other piece of knowledge can be had with the click of a button. It's now an age-old adage about the "information age," a time we seemingly take for granted. But what if you want to know more about Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk? In a time when privacy and anonymity are trivialized, Daft Punk continue to don their masks and create music devoid of desperately appearing as though it was culled from their personal influences.
On Random Access Memories, Daft Punk's fourth studio album, the Parisian duo turn that formula on its head, trading in their time-tested computer programs for the collected human experience. But it's still not about their experience; it's about our experience. When they talk of giving life back to music, it isn't just about reaching into the past to create the future; it's about the communal aspects of music: the experience and heartbreak associated with the sounds and its people. Random Access Memories isn't the album Daft Punk should be making in 2013, and that's exactly why Daft Punk created it, and why it took eight long years to master. If the series of Creator's Project videos focusing squarely on the album's collaborators taught us anything, it's that the history of music can teach us more about our presence than anything being produced today.