The long-term intention for Join the Dots was for me to gradually tell more personal stories, or at least inject more of my own experiences into the pieces. Really this was something I was doing from the outset, but my month-long unintended break, between the Crazy and I-Level reviews, was one of a lack of motivation and doubting of skills. It has depressed me that this blog isn't on Google for some reason (if you're reading this, or have read any other piece here, thanks for clicking the link!) and generally I am sad I haven't made the most of this time off uni to write, before I suddenly, sickeningly turn 24 in the second half of September. But I have so many albums I want to write about, basically, and so many ways I envision telling them. And while my spirit is back, for however long that might be, I wish to harness it. And I've wanted to present my case for an album that, you know, there's a good chance a lot of my friends have actually heard, which hasn't happened since The Big Express.
Which brings me to the curious case of the third Daft Punk album, which when released in March 2005 after a four-year wait was met with hostility from fans and critics bordering almost on feelings of betrayal. What happened to Discovery's inclusivity, and all that loving, dynamic pop, all that repurposed 'uncool' soft rock and prog made vital? What's with this short album of static and pointedly un-housey tracks that repeat their only few ideas endlessly and never go anywhere? And why are they so joyless, and grooveless? Reynolds' pan of Human After All seemed to sum up the consensus, on how this new direction was merely "an archly ironic dance-rock that feels desultory and numb – verging on autistic".
But actually, he directly, partly touches on one thing I think is true there, which is that I think people may have a better chance of understanding Human After All if they're, ah-hem, autistic and depressed. Oh, I know this sounds fanciful, but I'm speaking from experience. While I don't usually consider it among my favourite albums, I listen to it more than any others by Daft Punk. I play it often, in fact, as it seems to cater to certain temperaments of mine in a way that few other full albums do. HAA isn't wholly bleak, but when it is, it lands me in the deep end, speaks to certain realities I find close to home and frankly too evasive in other music. And the album's individual dedication to repetition? And sheer determination in reiterating its obsessions, partly out of comfort, but partly out of wishing it will eventually help it get somewhere? That goes over the heads of many, but not mine. This album's minimalism – the short but incessant way it goes about everything – is the perfect canvas, nay mirror, when I'm a certain way. The way Brass Construction would originally style an album was one of lengthy dance tracks where, rhythm being upfront, words were usually short, direct hooks or even chants, just non-specific enough to allow you to plug yourself in. Human After All is that template taken to one uncomfortable extreme.
(Then again, one thing I find slightly perplexing about the album's reception is that, if anything, its no-frills nature was rather linked with the duo's debut album, Homework, an album so dry and often pop-resistant, and which stays so dry for so long (it is much longer than Human After All), that it fits very aloofly into the rockwrite narrative of 90s dance classics. And it is, again, hardly a record free of threat; "Alive" is five minutes of pure tenseness, while the pure acid-into-the-red "Rollin' & Scratchin'" and "Rock'n Roll" were the 'unlistenable' tracks that casual listeners, drawn in by the videos to the hits, were known to skip, becoming in that sense to Homework what "It Doesn't Matter" and "Don't Stop the Rock" were to Dig Your Own Hole or, later, "Same Old Show" and "Don't Give Up" to Remedy).
When I was a bit younger, I used to think of Human After All as the "00s Electric Café"; other than them being famously divisive, 'cold' mid-career albums where hearty topics are looked at distantly, I'm not sure there's much to that comparison. Rather, I look at the sleeve of Human After All, that eerie CRT telly fuzzily displaying the duo's logo like a battered old VHS (the way a much younger me would be scared shitless by the Granada endcap or, to a lesser extent, the 90s BBC Video ident), surrounded by only pitch black (which continues into the rest of the artwork. Pure black on the back cover, disc, etc. with the exception of further images of this damn TV) and wonder why it wasn't people's first warning; it's coming at you like a broadcast from places you don't want to know about.
The title track almost conceals its intensification through its drawn-out reiterations of the same basic theme. While the dissociate, very un-human voice perpetually tries convincing itself "we are human after all, much in common after all", by the end it has sunken to new lows, despairingly panting HU-MAN staccatos as it attempts to break from the rigid industrial clatter of the music that, in clear disagreement, is tightening the knot in 'its' heart. The use of extreme distortion to hide the pained singer trying to communicate as an aural representation of the boulders in their struggle is a lineage that goes through Trans, American Life and 808s & Heartbreak. Whereas apparently here, these robots are inhuman. And while I have no wish to crack myself open in a review of a Daft Punk album, it's just normal to me, with the dormancy I've felt for years in life and don't feel stopping any time soon, to automatically think of other people as 'proper people' and not myself. This is a harshly claustrophobic five minutes of music.
Compared to what comes next, though, it's just a setting of the stage. "The Prime Time of Your Life" is, as the reddest of all herrings, initially beatless and naked, mostly just fermenting guitar-synths trying to puke when there's nothing in the stomach. That name and refrain. The bladed reminder that despite everything I've missed my youth; my many attempts to get it jump-started, to have a life, be a young person and do young people things, only to be utterly prevented by insecurities, by no one being around, by being awful at start conversations with people who are not interested anyway, by an absence of confidence. And yet here's the bludgeoning aide-memorie - "Prime time of your life. Live it. Today." – deviously, ceaselessly stalking the mind to no end and to no good.
And why that beat? The pop swing of schaffel is 'meant' to be one of good times, the prime times of people's lives, in Daft Punk's universe going right back to glam rock and "Hot Love" and more recently to 2005 the bedrock of Rachel Stevens and Goldfrapp's finest singles, hits from my actual prime time. Here the track just chews up the schaffel with its chipped robot teeth into a poison akin to Christian Morgenstern's "Gem Club". And then "life" jams, the whole "song" boundlessly accelerating with increasing electric fencing and white noise voltage as all the atoms split (PCP's "We are from Frankfurt" or Moby's "Thousand" via the burning interface of Cybersonik's "Jackhammer") until there is rendered nothing but a horrifying, butchering spit – here's what you can do with your directionless prime time platitudes, everyone – before finally detonating into a huge silicon nothing, leaving you in the huge blackness that envelopes the artwork. Because that what it gets like, when you just can't come to terms with 'it'. And this is of course without even considering the Tony Gardener video, and what this could all mean to someone else on the tether's end.
Recognising that it's shot its sharpest bolt, the album immediately retreats into "Robot Rock". As anyone will point out, yes, it's essentially a four second loop of Breakwater's "Release the Beast" looped into infinity with less than the bare minimum of embellishment (just the spoken song name). But as a lead single it's daringness has gone underappreciated – admittedly it would seem more radical giving the audience a momentary loop of a song they already all know, ergo forcing everyone to try hearing it anew, but where others see laziness I see a more innocent plunderphonica: two musicians feeling a direct kindred spirit in 1980 and letting it encroach their own fabric uninterrupted, a spirit furthered by it being rendered at its core a dumb garage rock groove, strutting its stuff like "You Really Got Me". Or, more accuaretly, "Take Me Out", remixed by Daft Punk utilising an infamously hands-off approach a year earlier; if anything, the clinical road to Human After All publicly began there.
But I also think of Ferry Corsten's crossover hit "Rock Your Body Rock", also released in early 2004 and similarly a Now 57 favourite of mine, and clock how its vocoder refrain, noisy electro surfacing and trashy charm also envisaged "Robot Rock" on the horizon, and I consider what it is to be a track that, even for Human After All, most people find way too long (most people would cut it off where the radio edit ends) whereas I don't. Rocking back and forth to music, something I've always done, something my parents were told when I was diagnosed with Asperger's that I would soon grow out of but haven't and never will. It moves but it never moves; plus, I rarely find cyclical songs outstay their welcome. I could say the same about the "Steam Machine", which seems to use rocking more as a coping mechanism. A clenched-teeth refrain breathing down your neck and over chromised squelches, ultra-processed like dangerous, fenced-off power sources, or like "Da Funk" with the panics. From afar it might sound like a party, up close its decaying at the seams, and though the odd discursion is glimpsed – breaking up the riff into a swing rhythm, or a momentary Mantronix-type cut-up – it largely stays shelled up and detached.
"Make Love" has studied smooth soul and Philly, analysed timeless love songs and forced a perceived grasp of their essence, but has never come close to romance itself; it loves 'love' in theory but doesn't understand how to harness it. So it just sits on the edge of the world playing these soft funk licks, these muffled Barry White signifiers, to its disquieted self while looking out aimlessly and forlornly at the world. It's Peter Skellern's "Hold on to Love" or Marvin's Let's Get It On abandoned forever in Joy Division territory. It's Liquid's "Sweet Harmony" sans any sweet harmony. Where "Digital Love" had writ unrequited love into a thousand explosive colours, giving its lovelorn robot a sci-fi super-reality, the sort of track to make people's hearts stop, all "Make Love" does is catatonically watch the lovers entwined pass it by, over and over. It's "Digital Love" battered into submission, tired of waiting.
Really, the true link between the two records is Together's "So Much Love to Give", Bangalter's 2002 collaboration with DJ Falcon and the best thing either of them ever did, where the vivaciousness of "Digital Love" still survives but the private act of unending repetition has already taken its hold. Say 'I've got so much love to give' once and it's ambitious. Say it a million times, however, and its beyond desperate. Say it a million times, set it to bleeding waves of filter-house and it'll still sound beyond desperate, but now also heartbreaking. The Freeloaders' cover, which debuted inside the UK Top 10 the same week "Robot Rock" blinked a disinterested peak at number 32, should have taken note of that rather than at certain junctures resolve both the music and the sample ("...to you!") to give it a happy ending. The Together original may even have one too, but just as with "Make Love", it fades out too soon for anyone to tell.
But the Freeloaders – one of those flashy, Freemasons/Meck/Hi_Tack-style outfits – outselling singles by Bangalter's main project scratches a blatant truth which is the continued growth of Daft Punk's already huge impact on pop; no longer did stuff have to sound 'like' DP to mark them as a clear inspiration. The riffage of Bodyrockers' top three hit from the following week, "I Like the Way" (a sort of slimy old man version of Deep Dish's gorgeous and stylish "Flashdance", also a top three hit seven months earlier), makes it plainer, likewise LCD Soundsystem's "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House", which went Top 30 just before the album was released. So Human After All's dance-rock crunch couldn't be more 2005, the year that epitomised the American-European garage melting pot of post-punk and dance, bands and DJs, that had been in currency since electroclash, mashups and the DFA (and the parallel New Rock and what not).
Inevitably, most of Daft Punk's fellow late 90s, album-oriented, rock canon-friendly peers were also in step: The Chemical Brothers' "Come Inside" and "The Big Jump", Fatboy Slim dusting off the old bass guitar for Palookaville, Moby doing similar things on his much-maligned Hotel, or the Prodigy breathing renewed vigour on "Girls" and the rather less renewed vigour on the still underrated parent album. Human After All, with its Soulwax-friendly dynamics and DIY-fetishising three week recording, could never wish to hide its communication with all this other music. But "The Brainwasher" is perhaps the most successful in that respect, with its increasing layers of attack and noise (as opposed to "Robot Rock" stillness) making it among the album's most accessible moments. Which isn't to say it's a departure from the record's overall picture – it still sounds isolated and moves itself along uneasily. But though 'the brainwasher' here can stand for anything, it's mostly magnetising fun, another chance for the album to express the joy of dancing or at least moving to music in your own little space.
Which I can't stress enough for me personally, as someone who has never even been to a nightclub. Not that I wouldn't go, but I've never been invited and don't have the courage to go alone. Which is the story of me and an outdoor life in general. Dance music, broadly speaking, is a deep, lifetime passion of mine, but as someone who stays isolated, with all my nearest friends still some 20 miles away in a big, scary city, music is overall a very personal part of my life, no matter how communal its intentions, or how much I warmly regard the idea of it being communal, and I only usually get to enjoy music with others in online discussions. Human After All, despite being rooted in house and despite its sonic picture being synonymous with the wider 2005, sounds – as if I hadn't made it obvious enough already – like it was meant for people that don't get to see other people all too often.
The album then abruptly does the opening of Zoo TV in reverse, starting with the channel-hopping collage ("On/Off") and then pressing with song-shaped study of telly and the masses. But "Television Rules the Nation" takes a look at the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's own similarly-named song, strips it of all its content but retains the industrial brickwork, leaving but a practically useless would-be-slogan, hammers and chisels, vomiting Homework synths and a lot of blankness. I do see how people would want to flesh these barebones, and its less personal, or personalised, 'subject' ensures a less personal strain (making it the odd song out, if anything has to be). Yet as peopleoids observing the space between the lines of real people, and being unable to process them in any meaningful way, it nails the article of "fear and paranoia" Thomas and Guy said they were reflecting just as much as anything else here.
The unexpected parallels to early 90s U2 continue with "Technologic", a sort of psycho-cybernetic cousin of "Popcorn" that reassembles memories of the Edge's "Numb" (intoned, curt commands) and the Beta Band's "Smiling" (helium-voiced, curt accusations) (although the cyber-speak here rather predicts the U2 of "Unknown Caller", closing the circle crudely). The near-incessant instructions from a pitched-up automaton to buy, use, break, fix, change, mail, upgrade... invite you to view it as some dark humour on the malaise of modernity, or suchlike. Whereas what is mostly it to me, someone who again can struggle in basic conversation, and who fears being given tasks where the cost is on others if I happen to fuck up at all, but the sometime inability to function under such circumstances? The deliberately off-putting video makes it obvious that, even though this is pop enough to pass as a single, it's not good times music.
Yet with "Emotion", a seven-minute daydream and sigh as the gradual fade of daylight starts to creep in through the window, the album slows down and wisely ends with tentative but crucial hope. Or at least that's how I choose to enjoy it right now (you can just as easily see it as a similarly one-minded sibling to "Make Love"). As per usual, your lot is just a single loaded word, repeated until feeling is unavoidable. It swells and rises, perhaps looking ahead or just having an epiphany about the minutiae of the present, and ensures the record closes by drifting into space (much like "Subterraneans" on Low; indeed both albums are riddled with parallels, Bowie near-wordlessly moving further away from the burning centre of that album until he's 'left every place', after all). And for what is a generally absolutionist album, it's a nobly inclusive ending. Except accusations that this album isn't inclusive really mean the album isn't dancefloor fodder. It, like Low (which in its day was chastised by some, notably Charles Shaar Murray, for not entirely unrelated reasons), aims to reach a lot of certain other people who don't readily come to mind to most listeners.
But audiences required the Alive 2006/07 tour for the tracks to make sense to them, to reveal their symmetry to all the duo had done before. They needed the introverted music to become an extroverted experience shared with everyone else (hence, Alive 2007 is considered a modern live masterwork by the same people who leave Human After All gathering dust, regardless of the strong overlap). Daft Punk took note. The next album, when it eventually arrived in 2013, was perhaps the only true example of an Event album in all my experience – something jointly anticipated by people from every part of my life: school friends, online friends, family members, the radio I'd hear, the writers I'd read. It was, of course, wildly popular, but in hindsight it feels like Daft Punk gradually shed everything that once defined them; first remixes, then live sets, then house music, then finally themselves. A prolonged shutting down where Human After All was frequently one captured in freeze frame.
