Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

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ordinaryperson
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Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by ordinaryperson »

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Discovery by Daft Punk

AM Ranking: #228
Genre: French House
Release: 26 February 2001
Label: Virgin
Ranked Songs: One More Time (#283), Digital Love (#714), Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (#1162), Aerodynamic (#4209)

WikipediaRYM

01 | One More Time
02 | Aerodynamic
03 | Digital Love
04 | Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
05 | Crescendolls
06 | Nightvision
07 | Superheroes
08 | High Life
09 | Something About Us
10 | Voyager
11 | Veridis Quo
12 | Short Circuit
13 | Face to Face
14 | Too Long



Any type of opinion can be expressed on these discussion threads, you can post just a few words or a couple of paragraphs, you can even rank the tracks if you wanted to. New discussions will be posted on Fridays, so that users will have the time over the weekend to listen to the album and form their opinion on it.

HINT FOR NEXT WEEK'S ALBUM
Next week's album is a combination of different genres that are hardly ever combined.
There is No More Firmament.
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PlasticRam
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by PlasticRam »

The first four songs are great. After that there's some filler in my opinion. Still a great album overall.
I feel like that
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Safetycat
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by Safetycat »

Hooray, an album I've actually heard before! And not just heard, but one I love immensely - one of my top three albums of the 2000's.

Discovery opens with a bang. The first 5 songs are all stunning, and alone cement its place in music history. Aerodynamic might be my favourite Daft Punk song, and the others are all wonderful as well.

After that, as PlasticRam said, some of the songs are filler. This is not an album without flaws. A lot of the quieter songs drag on for too long (including, of course, Too Long), and some of them just don't do it for me. But most of them do.

Of course, one thing that should be mentioned as well is how transformative the experience can be if you watch Interstella 5555 rather than just listening to the album. Some parts of the album were clearly made to fit the film, not the other way around, and it shows - but that just means that those songs work a lot more when you watch the film.

In the end, even with the flaws, I'll always love this album.
Tortuga
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by Tortuga »

On my MP3 player, I've rearranged the track listing a bit to have "Night Vision" in between "High Life" and "Something About Us". This way, the album is more clearly divided into the fast side and the slow side.
Nick
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by Nick »

It's pretty hard to overstate the importance of this album on both myself, my cohort of friends, and a large amount of people who came of age in the 2000s. I was born in 1991, and so while I wasn't ready for Daft Punk when Discovery was released, I WAS ready for the band when their career had a bit of a revitalization thanks to the success of their live album, Alive 2007, which, anecdotally, is the release that probably cemented their cult legend status in the eyes of my peers. Discovery has been the soundtrack to countless parties I've been to, from my teens throughout my twenties, and the first four songs have to be one of the greatest four song runs on any album. And while nothing else on the album matches the dizzying heights of "One More Time" and "Digital Love" (two songs that made my top 100 of all time in the most recent songs poll), there are still a wealth of great tracks to be found later on the album, like the crooning "Something About Us" and the instrumental "Voyager". An absolute classic.
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acroamor
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by acroamor »

Definitely in agreement on the first four tracks being an absolutely stellar run. "High Life" is the only track that really grates on me with repetition - I can usually get down with overlong repetitive music that others might tire of.

Also, for some reason, whenever I downloaded this album back many years ago, the track "Nightvision" was replaced with a lo-fi electric guitar cover of "Nightvision", almost like a fan of the album recorded themself jamming in their bedroom and slipped it into the track listing. But because I assumed that was just Daft Punk making a stylistic move, I never tried to fix it even when I discovered what the actual song sounded like.

On the back half, "Something About Us", "Face to Face", and "Short Circuit" are my personal favorites.

And next week is a combination of genres hardly ever combined? My guess is gonna go to Fire of Love by the Gun Club.
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Rob
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Re: Album Club Discussion #9: Daft Punk's Discovery

Post by Rob »

Again late; but a new one isn't up yet.

One post above this one Acroamor claims he has a higher tolerance for repetition in music than most. Sadly, I am the exact opposite. So as you might guess from that, Discovery was a challenge.

This is one of those classic albums I'd never listened to before, because I never felt the need to. I did already see the anime Daft Punk made with Leiji Matsumoto, called Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, which is build around all of the songs on Discovery. Sort of an elaborate music clip if you like. I saw that in 2006 or so, so a detailed review of that is not gonna work, but I do remember thinking that the movie was as silly and as appealing as the use of the number 5 in it's title. I guess it says enough that I never went and listened to the album afterwards. It took me more than 10 years to be forced into it.

I did here a few of the songs a lot though, as the hits are inescapable. They appear quite regularly in polls on this site alone and One More Time and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger still seem to be on the radio each day. This music doesn't seem to go out of fashion. Too bad for me, because the two tracks I named just now are not for me. Especially One More Time is the type of endlessly repetitive song that has turned me off from dance music for long. I think I mentioned somewhere here recently that beats barely do anything for me and with a lot of repetition it just becomes a chore to sit through. Harder, Better is harder but hardly better, but at least it's robot motivational angle has some appeal (which doesn't make me a fan of the song though).

In the deep cuts things frequently get even worse for me. One More Time has nothing on Superheroes, a track that for a non-fan as me plays as a parody on the whole genre, although not a parody that makes me laugh. It is followed by the equally tiresome High Life. The album end with something called Too Long, which lasts 10 minutes. I hoped that title was somewhat self-conscious, but no such luck.

That's the bad news. The good news is that there are still some tracks here I do actually like. Digital Love is kind of endearing and even I get a kick out of Aerodynamic. Bonus points for turning Cresscendolls into a modern P-funk song! The unmentioned tracks didn't bother me as much as the ones above either. All in all there is too little here that makes me want to come back and I'll probably never listen to Homework until it shows up in this series (I do like Random Access Memory quite a bit, believe it or not), but I expected worse.
6/10
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