Discovery Review

Daft Punk stop trying to be taken seriously and get taken seriously anyway. The premise is nostalgia handled without irony: the disco, soft rock and radio pop the two of them grew up on, sampled, filtered and rebuilt with a vocoder out front. One More Time is four minutes of a single idea repeated until it turns euphoric, Digital Love converts a George Duke sample into the best pop song either of them ever wrote, and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger compresses a decade of production technique into a hook anyone can hum.

The sound design is the achievement. Every element has a job, the filter sweeps do the emotional work a chord change would normally handle, and producers have been borrowing the method ever since. The words, where there are any, are deliberately close to nothing, which is a choice rather than a failure but still leaves that axis with very little to grade. The critical record at release was warm rather than rapturous, with several writers calling the cheerfulness a gimmick, and the reappraisal since has been generous enough to obscure that.

Both readings are fair. The first half is close to perfect, the back half wanders through experiments that are interesting rather than good, and Too Long earns its title honestly. As a run of singles it is untouchable. As an album it is lopsided, and the grade follows the album.