Portrait

Daft Punk are what I call maestros. I’ve finally bought their Alive 2007 tour album, and I’ve been listening to it diligently over the last week. And it only goes to prove what I’ve always known about the duo: that they’re masters of their craft. Listening to Alive 2007 is spiritual for any long-time fan of Daft Punk. It’s like a dream come true. It’s the ideal, un-cheesy Best Of album, done with a sophistication and skill that other Best Of collections often lack. It’s their entire career’s best work, placed together in an artistically wholesome way. And for fans, it’s a way to somehow gain access to perhaps one of the decades best live tours. One of the decades best parties.

Because that’s what Alive 2007 seems to have been. Not a concert, but rather one awesome party, Daft Punk are but a speck onstage, in their robot suits, surrounded by colour, light and technology. They are not the cynosure. Instead, everything has been carefully set up to highlight the music, and increase the intensity of the mood of the party-goers present. They are non-entities. They are just the ones pressing the buttons. Alive 2007 wasn’t about two people. They made sure of that. It was about the sea of people that had come to rock.

They also have refused to release a DVD of the tour, saying that the various clips on YouTube are the greatest reward for them. Indeed, they have chosen wisely as always, wishing to put themselves in the background, and leaving the music to be the centre of attention. No images or clips could have done justice to what was this great event. And perhaps it is better not to even try.

The album itself is seamless and perfect. Tracks aren’t merely lined up and played one after the other. Their most famous tracks are cleverly mixed together in a way that has you wondering how they were ever two separate songs to begin with; the master mixing and added music make it seem so natural that they be played simultaneously. The intensity builds with each song, starting with the giant of true musical achievement Robot Rock, where the voices saying ‘Human’ and ‘Robot’ battle it out. This sets a tone that is familiar to fans: the underlying theme of possibly all of Daft Punk’s music, the premonition of a technology-heavy future, the constant question of whether electronic bleeps are the way forward in music. The flawless mix of Around the World and Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger seems the first real climax of the album, with pumping bass that must have had the thousands gathered jumping in perfect unison. Although many new musical elements have been introduced to surprise and tease, such as with Technologic, they also know where to leave classics alone, such as with Burnin’. Another track that makes two tracks seem as though they were meant to be one is their classic mixing of club favourite One More Time and Aerodynamic. The album peaks and continues to peak when you think it can’t take you any higher, and then ends with a glorious encore set of Human After All/ Together/ One More Time/ Music Sounds Better with You. Cheekily, they reprise the song perfect for reprise: One More Time.

The wonderful thing about this album is that it’s both great fun and musical genius simultaneously. You can sit and listen to it intensely, or you can party to it without having to worry about anything: Daft Punk has a journey planned for you that is best not messed with.

Just when everyone started to think they were dying, they did the years’ best come-back and proved that they are very much Alive. Paving the way for the music of the future, and holding their ground in a world where electronic music is constantly being re-defined, they were there to show that they are still at the top, and still wonderfully good at what they do.

The wonderful thing about Daft Punk is their inherent ability to make their songs, some of which are more than 10 years old, the music of the future. And this is what Alive 2007 was ultimately about: showing that the traditional can still sound good and can continue to sound good forever more.

Alive 2007 can stand as a great lesson for DJs and electronic musicians everywhere: that you can take the old, and constantly change it. That with the skill and the technology at hand, you can play one song in a thousand different ways, that each time you play it, you can own it. That you can play a song that is more than a decade old, and have people feel as though they have never heard it before: the fine skill it takes to perfectly merge the familiar with the new.

The world of electronic music has changed the way it sounds drastically since Homework in 1997; we are no longer restricted to the classic high hat/bass sound of House. The world has moved on, but Daft Punk is not being left behind. Instead they are leading the revolution of traditional House music. Ultimately, what Daft Punk did with Alive 2007, was prove that old-school House music can still sound incredibly cool.