(This isn't a review as much as me wanting to share my thoughts on an album with you.)
The music that most impresses me is music that changes my mind about something. Before Alive 2007, I did not think that electronic music could be great live. What are the DJs really doing up there? Are they just pressing play and letting the tracks go? What's live about that?
Then I heard Alive 2007. Alive 2007 is a live album taken from a concert in Bercy, France. It comes after Daft Punk released the amazing album Discovery in 2001 and the pretty underwhelming Human After All in 2005. I was unimpressed by Human After All, finding it too repetitive and feeling undeveloped. After hearing Alive 2007, I immediately forgave the '05 album. They left it undeveloped for a reason.
What Daft Punk did in Alive 2007 was weave their previous songs together, often on top of each other like a mashup artist (Girl Talk being the most famous). Unlike a mashup artist, Daft Punk is using songs that are originally theirs (ok not entirely as they use samples heavily, but you get my point). They use songs from different albums, not intended to be combined, and tie them together. Also unlike a mashup artist, they're patient with the tracks, letting them build and develop. I like Girl Talk but it's music with A.D.D. transitioning constantly from song to song.
Enough describing Alive 2007, listen for yourself. This is one of my favorite tracks off the album, Television Rules the Nation / Crescendolls. I think it's the perfect example of what Daft Punk does throughout the album. Let me walk you through it.
0:00 - The best part according to the top comment. The song starts with the most stripped down version of itself, just the robotic voice hook. They tease "Around the World" but stick to Television Rules the Nation.
0:47 - Drum beat comes in with repetition of "the world." Daft Punk always does a great job of building the tension, especially in their introductions. The layers continue to come in until
2:16 - You get the full Television Rules the Nation track
2:47 - Total jump into Crescendolls. No transition at all. They don't spend nearly as much time developing this track compared to Television.
3:17 - Drum track is totally new and different, going into double time it's much more frantic.
3:25 - They don't resolve the rising phrase, the main Crescendolls riff. They repeat a shortened version of the riff, never making it to the top of the phrase, begging for a resolution and then...
3:35 - You get the combination of Television and Crescendolls. It works so perfectly as the Television riff is in the low register and Crescendolls in the high register. With the two overlapping you get a new resultant chord progression. I like the combination of the two much more than either song on its own. The Television riff is so menacing and the chromatic Crescendolls riff is intense, making the combination just awesome.
Imagine if an artist, a painter, had two paintings that were great on their own. But somehow he finds a way to combine the two by, with some slight adjustments, placing them on top of each other. The colors combine and you get new shades, the blue and yellow becomes green, the red and blue becomes purple. And imagine if this painting was somehow more beautiful, more intense, whatever emotion the artist is seeking to convey, than the two originals. That is what Alive 2007 is like to me. Daft Punk does it on every track on the album with its greatest hits. And it's a live album! I can't imagine how amazing a show it must have been in person.
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