Random listening required

Music
Draft Punk
Random Access Memories

HEAVEN forbid Daft Punk did something different.
You would’ve thought they sang satanic verse while slaughtering small children based on other reviews of Random Access Memories – their fourth album in their 13-year career.
The doof doof clubs and darkened hell-holes in Melbourne’s seediest of seedy club scenes won’t get much rotational value from this record.
It’s lack of vanilla dubstep and generic blandness that the latest generation craves like the Pavlovian pooches of musical consumption they truly are is well and truly missing.
Instead Random Access Memories requires what people call “listening” and “understanding” rather than just encouraging the drug-addled drones to gyrate hopelessly off beat.
It doesn’t have the memorable licks that Discovery owned and defined as genre-creating, but you have to expect two men to grow up musically in the interceding years since 2001.
Get Lucky (featuring Pharrel) and Doing It Right (featuring Panda Bear) are closer to the mark of ‘old Daft Punk’, but don’t expect the whole album to fall into that wheelhouse. They are solid tracks with good collaboration.
Similarly, Instant Crush (featuring Julian Casablanca) is probably my favourite on the album – bit of old synth sound and a good listener.
Without insult, it’s closer to lounge music than club music. Do they have to represent house music forever anyway? Bit of musical growth never hurt.
So unfortunately for the disc scratchers in the club, you’ll have to rest your hopes on someone else’s work to vandalise.
Random Access Memories won’t please everyone – but I don’t think the Frenchman ever truly cared about that in any case.
– Jarrod Potter