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dr lopez

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    Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

    in New & Upcoming Releases

    Posted

    8 hours ago, Alcofribas said:

    great post.

    i see this album as an attempt to do a "real" studio album that harkens back to the late 70s/early 80s when this kind of album-making achieved a certain peak. i love records from that time and i think studio art really was achieving some incredible stuff. however, that time is gone. it's not enough to just try to recreate this, that's artistically empty. imo les freres simply did not cook their ideas enough to reach some new territory; instead they fell back on the conventions of a bygone era which is an artistic dead end. i think it's quite hard to attempt to revisit the past without just doing inane pastiche. when i listen to the record i just hear them making decisions that were made decades ago, about how records should sound and what makes them good - so in a way they just never really went to that place where artists have to grapple with their work, toil in the studio to solve problems and break out into new horizons for themselves. i just seems like they went to an established professional studio, hired appropriate professionals, and threw money into a project where they just did what other people used to do. it has a very steely dan kind of quality where it just sounds like musicians in a studio, nothing more. bloodless, easy, empty. to some extent i think artists usually can't really escape their limits and when they try too hard to get outside of themselves they end up making something that clearly could have and has been done way better by people who actually do that thing.  

     

    i think a counter example to this is BOC. after listening to the societas x tape, i think so much of what they do became a little more clear to us. they're not just doing nostalgia, they are re-creating music of the past (like literally doing this, not sampling) and then destroying it, taking it on a psychedelic adventure, drawing things out of it that would never have been done when it was first made. i very much see a record like TCH as a kind of late 70s/early 80s record, but one that could never have existed in that time. cultural, aesthetic, and technological changes have taken place and the brothers understand that you can't just go back to the way things used to be. there's always something distorted when you journey into the past and they don't ignore this, they dig deep right into this conflict. this, obviously, is a touchstone in all of their work imo: from the lost childhood of MHTRTC to the post-apocalyptic TH.

    just doing your album in the style of fleetwood mac rumors is saccharine and soulless. as an artist you have to confront the inherent conflicts of this situation, otherwise you really do just produce a kind of cover-band record.

     

    like d-lo said, they became another LA band...

    all of this except i think they legitimately thought they were "updating" the sound by adding those inane french vocoders on every track

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