Rating:
Genre:
Electronica
Release Date: 05/08/2001
Four long years after their debut,
Homework,
Daft Punk returned with a second full-length, also packed with excellent productions and many of the obligatory nods to the duo's favorite stylistic speed bumps of the 1970s and '80s.
Discovery is by no means the same record, though. Deserting the shrieking
acid house hysteria of their early work, the album moves in the same smooth
filtered disco circles as the
European dance smashes (
"Music Sounds Better With You" and
"Gym Tonic") co-produced by
DP's
Thomas Bangalter during the group's long interim. If
Homework was
Daft Punk's
Chicago house record, this is definitely the
New York garage edition, with co-productions and vocals from
Romanthony and
Todd Edwards, two of the brightest figures based in New Jersey's fertile
garage scene. Also in common with classic
East Coast dance and '80s
R&B,
Discovery surprisingly focuses on songwriting and concise productions, though the pair's visions of bucolic
pop on
"Digital Love" and
"Something About Us" are delivered by an androgynous, vocoderized frontman singing trite (though rather endearing) love lyrics.
"One More Time," the irresistible album opener and first single, takes
Bangalter's
"Music Sounds Better With You" as a blueprint, blending sampled horns with some retro bass thump and the gorgeous, extroverted vocals of
Romanthony going round and round with apparently endless tweakings. Though
"Aerodynamic" and
"Superheroes" have a bit of the driving
acid minimalism associated with
Homework, here
Daft Punk is more taken with the glammier,
poppier sound of
Eurodisco and late
R&B. Abusing their pitch-bend and vocoder effects as though they were going out of style (about 15 years too late, come to think of it), the duo loops nearly everything they can get their sequencers on -- divas, vocoders, synth-guitars, electric piano -- and conjures a sound worthy of bygone
electro-pop technicians from
Giorgio Moroder to
Todd Rundgren to
Steve Miller.
Daft Punk are such stellar, meticulous producers that they make
any sound work, even superficially dated ones like spastic early-'80s
electro/
R&B (
"Short Circuit") or faux-orchestral synthesizer baroque (
"Veridis Quo"). The only problems on
Discovery arise when
Daft Punk compensate for the album's lack of six-minute dance tracks by including a few too many half-developed productions like
"High Life" and the ambient piece
"Nightvision." One other crime is burying the highlight of the entire LP near the end.
"Face to Face," a track with
garage wunderkind
Todd Edwards, twists his trademarked split-second samples and fully fragmented vision of
garage into a
dance-pop hit that could've easily stormed the charts in 1987.
Daft Punk even manage a sense of humor about their own work, closing with a ten-minute track aptly titled
"Too Long." ~John Bush, All Music Guide
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