![]() RAM's sound design is less indebted to techno and house than to funk and soft rock, for both good and ill. On Fragments of Time there may even be a lap steel guitar sighing. Throughout, the strings on RAM are made of catgut, not 1s and 0s human orchestras swell. 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 genteel boogie-ing. ![]() Only one song features samples, apparently. 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 swerved. Just as electronic dance music is having its day, however, RAM wrong-foots preconceptions of what a new DP album might be – squelchy, chic, made on computers, by robots – with the agility of an amyl-assisted mountain goat. Moreover, RAM is now being released into a cultural climate in which electronic dance music – that bogus canned stuff made by effete, metrosexual Europeans, or so America had it – has finally been embraced by vast swaths of the US heartland: frat boys and their ilk. Kanye West's generous sampling of Daft Punk's Harder Better Faster Stronger on his 2007 single Stronger can take some credit for the seep of Daft into the US mainstream. This retro-futurist funk masterpiece is now the biggest hit of Daft Punk's career, No 1 for most of the spring. 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. Random Access Memories, their fourth studio album, is one of the most fiercely anticipated releases of the year. These things don't often figure in discussions of Daft Punk, the electronic duo whose filtered French house crossed over from clubs to charts 16 years ago with their debut album, Homework.
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