CD Review: Human After All

Make it stop. Make the Vocoder voices stop. This is not the ’80s. Do not use a Vocoder more than four times on an album.

Most of “Human After All,” Daft Punk’s third LP, is, sadly and surprisingly, as stupid, repetitive, and boring as a techno album can be. And they can be pretty stupid, repetitive, and boring. I say “most of” because there are a few spots that would have fit among the middle-to-low-end tracks on one of their previous CDs, which brought the pair of Parisian DJs much-deserved fame and acclaim.

The title track opens the album with a promising and well-layered beat that builds excitingly until a Vocoder voice starts repeating the words “we are human…after all.” Then the same eight measures repeat for the rest of the song and the Vocoder becomes maddeningly annoying. By the time the song ends at just shy of five-and-a-half minutes you’ll be damn glad it’s over.

The second song, “The Prime Time of Your Life,” has a weird crackly, loogie-hocking aspect to the beat that’s unsettling, quirky, and fun. But, again, it’s ruined by that stupid robot voice, this time saying “gonna do it…O.K. now…the prime time of your life.” For the last two-and-a-half minutes (more than half the track) it just devolves into an unexciting drone. Several of the songs on the album display this kind of depressing progression, opening with a good beat and repeating it for four or five minutes without significant change.

The one that really bothered me, though, is the hateful “Robot Rock.” The beat has this horrible riff that sounds like it came off the most annoying effect on the keyboards in your Long Island high school’s bootleg “piano lab.” It’s this kind of aural insult that led fans to accuse the prerelease leakings of the album to be the work of imposter hacks.

The album does have a pair of highlights, though. “Television Rules the Nation” has a beat cool enough to keep the song interesting, as does “Technologic,” in which a creepy artificial midget-voice repeats a string of ominous techno-words over an ever-changing and equally eerie backing. The latter recalls the frantic acceleration of “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” off of their masterpiece album “Discovery.”

Also, the two relatively chilled-out tracks, “Make Love” and “Emotion,” work fairly well as slow ambient pieces. Not because they’re less repetitive than the others, but because the beats aren’t intrusive enough to get on your nerves.

Daft Punk members Guy Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter once seemed like robotic (or at least android) supermen. Their debut, “Homework,” was a catchy disc that mainly hewed to dance-techno conventions. “Discovery” was a daring work that convinced many a listener (myself included) that electronic music could be interesting, catchy and danceable—all at the same time.

It’s a suprising shame, then, that “Human After All” is so goddamn awful. If I’d bought this instead of “Discovery” back in 2001 I’d never have given DP another chance. That would have been a tragedy, since the two are capable of so much more. They reportedly spent six weeks on this album, from writing to mastering. Let’s hope they spend more time on the next.

—Staff writer Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at mohammed@fas.harvard.edu.