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May 29, 2013This is a dazzling album, steeped in soul and brimming with an uncommon musicality, all rhythmic urgency and compelling melodies and anthemic choruses.
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May 20, 2013By assembling a cast of their favourite musicians and delving into their adolescent memories, Daft Punk have created something as emotionally honest as any singer-songwriter confessional--and a lot more fun to dance to.
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May 20, 2013It took exuberance, painstaking detail, and wide-eyed nostalgia for Daft Punk to create Random Access Memories, their best.
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May 14, 2013Their return should be heralded from on high, because it is the boldest, smartest, most colourful and purely pleasurable dance album of this decade.
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May 14, 2013It's a headphones album in an age of radio singles; a bravura live performance that stands out against pro forma knob-twiddling; a jazzy disco attack on the basic house beat; a full collaboration at a time when the superstar DJ stands alone. It's also quite moving; melancholy runs through every song.
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Q MagazineMay 13, 2013Daft Punk's best album in a career that's already redefined dance music at least twice. It is, in short, a mind-blower. [Jun 2013, p.88]
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May 13, 2013This is the album on which Daft Punk are truly and convincingly "human after all." And on this toweringly grand achievement, they've never sounded better.
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May 22, 2013Despite the level of fastidiousness that’s standard to Daft Punk, Random Access Memories still sounds loose. The album doesn’t feel synthetic or disingenuous, as it perhaps should. So perhaps these two are cooler than anyone you know.
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Jun 24, 2013With Random Access Memories, the duet has returned after a long hiatus from proper studio albums, with another triumphant winner.
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May 23, 2013Unbound by convention, Daft Punk seamlessly included whatever the hell they wanted on this record. Not just because they’re musically sublime robots from a future of hovercrafts and Judy Jetson discotheques, but because Daft Punk knows when to edit and when to fall free.
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May 20, 2013Random Access Memories is also Daft Punk's most personal work, and richly rewarding for listeners willing to spend time with it.
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May 9, 2013Random Access Memories is, for all the DJ-on-camera dancing hype, an album in the proper sense of the word; these aren't thirteen dancefloor ready bangers, it's a grandiose statement of intent.
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Jul 3, 2013RAM has the immediate appeal of disco, but never overstuffs with candied hooks, even when we want it to.
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May 20, 2013The record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.
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May 23, 2013Random Access Memories is teeming with life, and the multitude of genres presented as well as the production choices of the duo help the album deliver on its promise.
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May 17, 2013In the first half especially the format of fast song/slow song/fast song/slow song is adhered to a little too rigidly and, while the individual tracks are fantastic, it feels a little disjointed.
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May 21, 2013The album is nonetheless an entrancing and endlessly entertaining musical experience, a fun collection that can soundtrack a great party from start to finish, but also rewards the focused listener with a collage of fascinating quirks.
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MojoJun 18, 2013Random Access Memories manages to maintain a core of sense and sobriety. [Jul 2013, p.83]
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May 28, 2013With only a couple of uninspiring tracks, this is an ambitious game-changer that’ll leave you with a renewed optimism about the future of music.
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UncutMay 24, 2013Silly and overblown, but wittily, brilliantly so. [Jul 2013, p.73]
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May 23, 2013The songs’ simple moods--at times sentimental, winsome and ecstatic--nicely play off the depth and obsessive detail in the music.
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May 22, 2013RAM can oftentimes feel scattered, too ambitious, or too similar to the era it’s working from, but, in the end, it’s an album held together by that palpable reverence.
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May 21, 2013There’s definitely an epic heft to it, aided by a deep, varied bench of guest talent.
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May 21, 2013What Daft Punk have done on Random Access Memories could be seen as a methodically curated, musical museum of the future, rather than a conservatory for experimental collaboration.
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May 20, 2013Random Access Memories proves that Daft Punk remain masters of their domain, who defend their array of superlatives because of, rather than in spite of, unconventional sound choices.
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May 20, 2013It has no chance in hell to answer to all the hype and buzz around it, it’s not going to impact the dance music scene that reveres the robots so and you might as well be playing it on shuffle, but it’s a rich and warm musical experience that suits both the dancefloor and concentrated headphone listening in equal amounts that forms an important part of the duo’s musical journey.
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May 20, 2013once Random Access Memories unravels, it is, at its best, pretty magnificent.
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May 20, 2013It's an album which makes you feel warm.
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May 20, 2013Daft Punk have shone a laser beam into dark corners of the 70s and 80s and made them sing again, with timbres more human than ever before.
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May 17, 2013They're not robots, they're "robots." They "rock" and want you to "dance." In that sense, this is absolutely in keeping with the band's legacy. It is theater: absolutely sincere and totally fake.
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May 15, 2013As long as you’re prepared to accept that it’s a Hollywood production inspired more by Steely Dan and California highways than Cajmere and French basements, then Random Access Memories is a treat.
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May 15, 2013Its flaws are outweighed by moments that justify the excitement. It felt like a major event before its release: more incredibly, it still does once you've heard it.
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May 14, 2013Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have made an analog album that's less of a "throwback" and more of a salute to the idols that would now do anything to hop on the duo's full-length.
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May 13, 2013At times, the album is a victim of its own ambition. But it wouldn't be half as awesome a ride if it had aimed any lower.
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May 9, 2013Like their Discovery LP which laid fresh pathways for pop and dance in 2001, Random Access Memories breathes life into the safe music that dominates today’s charts, with its sheer ambition.
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Jun 26, 2013They've wisely chosen to not compete with the younger generation of DJs, and shown the upstarts the roots of dance music. They've also proven that they are not one-trick ponies who can only build beats on samples. They do just as well with a completely different sonic pallette.
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May 20, 2013In many ways, it is the least forward-looking Daft Punk recording, but also the most ambitious--a concept album that plays like an alternative music history, with an emphasis on styles and sounds that don’t usually fit into the Baby Boomer-dictated pop/rock canon.
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May 21, 2013Random Access Memories is by no means a perfect record, but it consistently possesses an inspired, organic sense of a vitality, a quality that is often denied by the cut-and-paste status quo of EDM.
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May 17, 2013After the sometimes frustrating, frequently exhilarating journey, the thrilling, head-shattering, Captain Eugene Cernan-sampling 'Contact', manned by DJ Falcon, simply soars.
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May 17, 2013RAM is an album that ultimately comes off having more respect for its spiritual predecessors than its listeners.
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May 9, 2013Not a great leap forwards, then, but a welcome throwback nonetheless.
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May 21, 2013This is the hardest Daft Punk’s ever worked on an album, but their songwriting and programming skills aren’t up to the others.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 1,050 out of 1206
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Mixed: 78 out of 1206
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Negative: 78 out of 1206
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May 21, 2013
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May 26, 2013
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May 21, 2013