Daft Punk: Alive 2007

Daft Punk's 2005 album Human After All was supposed to be the end of the line—a last gasp from an aged duo who had not only run out of ideas, but also heretically stooped to acknowledging certain "human" qualities that nobody with a soft spot for robots wanted to know about. Or at least that's how the reviews had it at the time.

The story suffered from two problems, however: First, Human After All was nowhere near the aesthetic failure it was purported to be, and second, all talk of obsolescence stopped making the least bit of sense shortly thereafter, once word of Daft Punk playing live atop a luminescent pyramid started making the rounds. Alive 2007 captures a good deal of the energy that all that talk—much of it panting and monosyllabic—tried to account for. The set was recorded at a show in Paris, and the songs audibly beloved by Daft Punk's hometown crowd work well at twisting the duo's discography into new knots. Hints of newer hits flitter into the main parts of older songs, resulting in functional mash-ups set out in the pattern of a DJ set. The intensity simply builds and builds, until it becomes wondrously hard to sort the noise from the rhythms, and vice-versa.