Human After All

In Daft Punk's 2003 animated movie Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, the French electronic twosome turned its 2001 album Discovery into a retro-futurist parable about an outer-space rock band exploited by evil record-company earthlings. Now Daft Punk are taking the next aesthetic step: Human After All is a concept album about technology and how it threatens to turn us all into robots. Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo exaggerate their band's own robotic tendencies here, much to the detriment of its grooves. Downplaying disco in favor of deliberately cheesy Eighties rock, the duo mostly repeats rather than elaborates its riffs. Although cuts like "Robot Rock" begin with promising processed-guitar motifs, nothing builds to achieve the prior glories of "Da Funk" or "One More Time." Daft Punk may have become the victim of their own animatronic satire.