Eamon Blog
Today's Shelf Pull: Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
Four sides, a patient groove, and room for the quieter turns.
Random Access Memories rewards listening past the familiar hooks, where its quieter songs and longer arrangements give the movement its meaning.
Daft Punk give Random Access Memories a generous opening, but generosity is not quite the same thing as hurry. The music makes its entrance, establishes a groove, and leaves room to notice how much is happening around that steady centre.
Released in 2013, the duo's fourth studio album shifts attention towards live instrumentation and studio craft. On vinyl, its thirteen tracks occupy four sides, a useful arrangement for music that keeps changing the size and temperature of the room.
The pleasure is in those changes rather than any single promise of a good time. Disco and funk supply movement, while the more reflective passages complicate it. This is dance music with somewhere to sit down, without making a ceremony of sitting.
The eight years since the previous studio album are useful context, not a listening requirement. You need no homework to follow the contrast between the opening confidence and the inward turn that follows. The sequence does the explaining for you.
Give Life Back To Music opens with a sweep that makes the title feel like a practical suggestion. Listen to the relationship between the groove and the surrounding detail: the pulse provides a fixed point while the arrangement gives the ear somewhere else to travel.
The Game Of Love lowers the emotional light without abandoning that sense of precision. Its slower romantic mood matters here. Placed second, it makes clear that the album will not simply keep adding brightness until there is nowhere left to look.
Then Giorgio By Moroder takes nine minutes and four seconds to widen the frame. Its narrative shape asks for a different kind of attention from the preceding songs. Side A ends with scale and storytelling, rather than another version of its opening invitation.
That first side offers a useful listening method for the rest: follow the changes in emphasis, not just the beat. The album moves between direct pleasure and elaborate construction, and neither quite cancels the other. It likes a working mechanism, but also a flourish.
Side B begins with Within and Instant Crush before arriving at Lose Yourself To Dance. The move from introspection towards a looser groove gives the side a direction. These are not merely three songs parked together because there was sufficient space.
Touch opens Side C with eight minutes and eighteen seconds of theatrical ambition. Against that scale, Get Lucky offers a more immediate point of contact. The contrast lets the familiar song do useful work inside the album, rather than stand outside it.
Beyond completes that side, so Get Lucky is a passage rather than a destination. It is worth hearing the sequence without reaching for the next favourite. A song changes its proportions when you hear what has been placed on either side of it.
The longer pieces also alter your sense of time. Giorgio By Moroder and Touch have room to develop an argument rather than deliver one gesture. Their lengths matter less as measurements than as permission to follow an arrangement beyond its first convincing idea.
Side D runs through Motherboard, Fragments Of Time and Doin' It Right before Contact closes the album. That last stretch deserves attention of its own. The build towards the ending gives the fourth side a purpose beyond tidying away what remains.
What stays with me is the balance between exactness and ease. The grooves are precise, but the album's reflective turns stop that precision feeling like its whole subject. There is room for hesitation inside the machinery.
The double album format makes those shifts easy to register without pretending that a side break explains everything. Four sides offer four small opportunities to reconsider the mood. Sometimes the useful listening accessory is simply a pause.
For today's Kilmorna shelf pull in Listowel, the invitation is straightforward: hear the familiar moments in company with the less immediate ones. Random Access Memories has enough movement to welcome you in, and enough patience to keep you listening.
On the shelf today:
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
2LP, 2013
Electronic / Ambient
EUR 38.95
Available from The Kilmorna Collection, Listowel
Buy or reserve: https://www.thekilmornacollection.com/vinyl/daft-punk-random-access-memories
Buying vinyl records in Ireland: https://www.thekilmornacollection.com/vinyl-records-ireland
On the shelf today
Daft Punk - Random Access Memories
2LP / Electronic / Ambient / 2013
EUR38.95 / Available now
Order / Reserve