Virgin Records
2005
Human After All
About This Album
Daft Punk has always been one of dance music's most flexible -- and accessible -- acts, spanning the relentless pulse of Homework and the lush, sprawling Discovery with a distinctive wit and playfulness that made fans of electronic music diehards and indie rockers alike. Though the long-awaited Human After All retains that playfulness, it's the duo's simplest album, which oddly enough, makes it their most difficult to embrace at first. Human After All was made in six weeks, and sounds like it -- and not always in a good way: the quick-and-dirty recording process and limited palette of grainy synths, vocoders, and guitars do lend a stripped-down, spontaneous feel, but just as often, this minimal approach feels like it's supporting minimal ideas. Most of Human After All's tracks concentrate on one or two heavily repeated motifs, giving some of the tracks the feeling of demos copied and pasted to a full song length (even more uncharitably, you could say that they sound like parts of a Daft Punk beats-and-loops construction kit). "Steam Machine," for example, starts off strong with a low-slung, low-rent drum machine beat and aptly hissy whispering, but fails to do much over the course of five minutes.
Track List (try tracks 1,5,9 and 10)

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