

Spearheaded by a choppy onslaught of robotic vocals, ‘Technologic’ has done the rounds, from iPod, Motorola and Alfa Romeo adverts to sun-kissed teen drama The O.C. There’s no questioning the impact of 2004 single ‘Technologic’. Read this next: Todd Edwards nearly made a vocal album with Daft Punk I think we were all very excited and surprised by the way he could sing this song.” This wouldn’t be the last time Daft Punk and Todd collaborated, with the latter also featuring on ‘Fragments Of Time’ from ‘Random Access Memories’.

Bangalter once told Pitchfork: "Todd Edwards sings sometimes but not like that. The production is a fruity pop-funk compote, with US producer Todd Edwards, a huge influence on Daft Punk, laying down the vocals. And yep, you guessed it, that track is based on the honey-lovin’ Winnie The Pooh. Let’s not forget another more obvious vocal sample of ‘House At Pooh Corner’ by Kenny Loggins and Jim Messina. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo sample the UK group twice on ‘Face To Face’, first with the wriggly riff from ‘Evil Woman’ and second with a subtle use of a vocal from ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’. This is music that uses its creators' thorough sense of pop history to create a sense of uplift, purpose and passion.Call Daft Punk Electric Light Orchestra fan boys if you dare, but there's enough reason to do it. Turns out these would-be robots are romantics, but they're not old softies. Daft Punk still makes appearances in helmets, but its members' feelings are no longer masked. "Turning our days into melodies," goes a line in that Daft Punk track, and it's this new desire to create songs that you and I could sing along to - to maintain the intensity and rhythms of dance music while letting it take a human breath - that gives Random Access Memories its touching vulnerability. One of my favorite cuts on the album is "Fragments of Time," which features a vocal by Todd Edwards and sounds a little like vintage Steely Dan, sleek and serenely clever. These collaborators range from Pharrell to Paul Williams - yes, the Paul Williams who wrote '70s hits such as The Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." They do it by largely avoiding samples on Random Access Memories, having Rodgers and others play real guitars and inviting other, non-mechanized voices to do some of the vocal work. The rhythm of "Get Lucky" is lushly irresistible and a perfect example of what seems to have struck Daft Punk's members, now in their late 30s, as a revelation: After years of constructing their music by sampling bits of other artists' beats and riffs, using technology to strip dance music down to its essence, they want to build their sound back up with fresh humanity. "Get Lucky," the album's superb first single, features lead vocals from Pharrell Williams and guitar work by Nile Rodgers, who co-founded the great disco band Chic in the '70s. Random Access Memories is a collection filled with music that suggests mad romance, heartache and an embrace of the past that's never merely nostalgic or sentimental. It's the equivalent of removing the helmet-masks the pair invariably wears in public performances. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo's mixture of electronic genres - techno, house, disco - but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn't turn me on in any other way.īut now, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses.

I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn't much of a Daft Punk fan.

Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter are the two men behind Daft Punk.
