Album Reviews

Escaping The Doors' "Light My Fire" was impossible throughout 1967's "Summer of Love". Likewise, unless you shuttered yourself indoors throughout this year's "Summer of Blah" you simply couldn't avoid Daft Punk's break out hit "Get Lucky" culled from the unlikely number eight spot in the album's thirteen song sequence.

What do I mean by "Summer of Blah"? Is this not the most, compliant, passive, drippy, "blah" generation to come down the pike in decades?

Who are they? What do they stand for? How much abuse will they stand for before they react to what's going on around them? No jobs? Okay, we'll live at home with mommy and daddy instead of holding politicians accountable. Spying on their emails and Internet chatter? No problem. Do they care that in state after state that they or their girlfriend's right to a safe, legal, constitutionally protected abortion is now extinct? Maybe they don't have girlfriends. Too much estrogen in the water. Only gay people seem energized and committed and they are (slowly but surely) getting what they want.

End of rant, okay? So here's this retro-disco album (a tribute album, not to an artist but to a musical time and place [disco, Los Angeles, late '70s, early '80's] ) and the hit single "Get Lucky" is dominating summer airplay. Maybe that's a good thing for a number of reasons. First of all, the recording is spectacular! Any dimwit happening upon this even in stunted MP3 form can't help but hear a recording that's also retro in the best sense of the word.

Other than the Vocoder-processed vocals, this album played mostly on real instruments (including a lavish string section, horns and woodwinds) has been produced to sound like the great records of another era by the body French musical duo as opposed to Air, which is the head French musical duo.

The two guys (Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo) reportedly spent upwards of a million dollars of their own money producing this record, which was recorded at Henson Recording Studios, Conway Recording Studios and Capitol Studios in California, Electric Lady Studios in New York City, and Gang Recording Studio in Paris, France (where most of the vocals were recorded). Everything was laid down to both analog tape and to digital, with the final choices made based upon which sounded better to all concerned, including mastering engineer Bob Ludwig.

There's not much here to engage the mind in the lyrics (other than on a few tracks like "Touch" and the finalé "Contact" which features a clip of astronaut Gene Cernan's spotting of what appeared to be a UFO) but in today's dead from the neck down world, though the body is in need of engagement and this record offers that plus a constant flow of "ear-delicious" sonics in the form of Liberace-lavish production and arrangements. And if you're old enough to remember this time period, you are guaranteed to have an endless flow of random access memories as well as of the sad fact that we now live in a basically joyless, on-the-cheap world.

The album opens with an anthem: "Give Life Back to Music", which is almost an instruction manual for a disengaged from music generation imploring them to "Let the music in tonight/Just turn on the music/Let the music of your life/Give life back to music"

Musically, it will have those who lived through the 1970's scratching their noses. So will most of the rest of this lavishly produced thought-inducing party album that proves if you want to give listeners a good time in the digital age, it is still possible. The record is part disco, part progressive rock, part space rock, part funk, part dinner-theater, and part psychedelic.

How much different is "Get Lucky" from Haddaway's early 1990 hit "What is Love?" used as the backdrop for a hilarious SNL sketch featuring Chris Kattan? Not very!

Here "Get Lucky" is followed up with "Beyond", which opens with a full orchestral swell performed by a real, live orchestra and you'd know it even if you didn't read the liner notes.

Daft Punk teams up with Nile Rodgers, The Strokes' Julian Casablancas, studio guitar wiz Greg Leisz, Giorgio Moroder (after which one tune is named in which he narrates how he invented the disco beat after laying down a guide click track), and the William's Pharrell and '70s veteran Paul, who gives Bowie-ish voice to "Touch" perhaps the album's most ambitious track.

The duo began conceptualizing the album while in Los Angeles working on the soundtrack to "Tron: Legacy." Perhaps they listened to Wendy Carlos's score for the original "Tron" that featured a symphony orchestra augmented with synthesizers (it was originally going to be produced in the opposite way, with mainly synths overdubbed with orchestral elements—I supervised the Academy Award nominated soundtrack as some of you know).

The more you listen to this record, the more it reveals the depth of its conceptual richness, even if it's expressed in disco beats. Even if you don't pay attention to that or to the lyrics (not that I would understand why you would do that), the rich quality of the cinematic production and recording will thrill the senses.

There's been some controversy about the album's mastering and a great deal of speculation so I asked the credited mastering engineer Bob Ludwig who generously gave me this statement for publication:

"With Daft Punk it is safe to say that I spent many separate attended sessions with them. During the first session we chose the best sounding source for EACH track. This is what I do for EVERY session. What was different this time was there were, I believe, 6 separate analog or digital sources from which to choose! I mastered the album going through many revisions, each with the most subtle changes each time. We changed the gaps between the songs, the fades etc. They wanted to make it perfect.

As we had finished my mastering a long time before the release date I gave my high resolution EQ files to Thomas to obsess over for the months it would be before released.

My understanding is in France they raised the level and re-eq'd the bass to compensate for the sound change the extra level would create. After buying the finished CD and comparing it with what I gave them to take, it seemed all the fades and gaps and my core EQ was all intact."

As for the double vinyl edition, cut by "Chab" at Translab, Paris, there is some dispute over whether or not it features somewhat wider dynamic range. I don't know. I don't have the CD. I can tell you this: the dynamics on the vinyl are wider than most contemporary productions, though of course there's still a good amount of compression, but this kind of music demands some to make it "pop" and this record pops in a good way. The sound is analog-rich, warm, almost fat, with bass that's deep, muscular and lavish. The stage is wide and deep. The midrange is lush and the top end never offends with grit or harshness, yet is open and airy with cleanly rendered transients. You can just keep cranking this up and it only gets better!

Yes, it is expensive (mine cost around $36) and lamely the digital download card gets you an MP3, not a high rez file, but the gatefold packaging is nicely done and the booklet is full-sized and in keeping with the rest of the production's high quality. I've been told that more than 30,000 double (well-pressed) 180 gram vinyl copies have been sold. I suspect just about 30,000 happy customers. Count me among them! Sorry it took so long to post this review.