Ideally, the physics of record reviewing are as elegant as actual physics, with each piece speaking to the essence of its subject as deliberately and as appropriately as a real-world force reacting to an action. In that world, where this is just another record by another dance act, Human After All is passable and hardly special.
But in my head, where items like Homework and Discovery and-- oh, what the hell-- "Music Sounds Better With You" and "So Much Love to Give" are allowed to be admitted as evidence, and where the weight of expectation and precedence get to have a say, this feels like not just a failure, but a heartbreaker.
The rap on Human After All is that it was recorded in two weeks, which should've been our first clue that it was going to surface as a droopy flower. Such cavalier recording approaches fly in the rock world because listeners are forgiving of minimal production methods; hell, as any Julian and Fab'll tell you, under the right light, they'll even embrace them. In rock music, where descriptors like "raw" and "ragged" are virtues, finesse is not only unnecessary, it's often discouraged. In dance music, where the illusion of performance has to be sculpted, finesse is more critical-- make a record in two weeks and 99.6% of the time, it'll sound like it was made in two weeks.
Turns out Daft Punk are (mostly) human after all, because from a compositional standpoint, this sounds like it was made in about 19 days. Even the good stuff sounds painfully extemporaneous, like early sketches of tracks that deserve to be much better. Take the title cut-- a slick, vocoder-driven track that, despite being one of the better offerings on the record, has such a clinical build that it registers as patterned and completely starved of joy. It's Daft Punk going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics.
If there's a defining thread to Human After All, it's that there's very little here that rings with wonderment or joy. The songs that make the most overt stabs at those emotions still sound like vague approximations of better songs that preceded them: "Robot Rock" is a poor man's "Aerodynamic", "Technologic" a poor man's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", and so on. Ultimately, it's the phoned-in "Television Rules the Nation" that confirms Daft Punk's slackening standards; they give us nine proper songs after four years and this is one of them?
In the end, it's not as if there aren't things to like about Human After All-- both "Make Love" and "Emotion", for example, are totally charming. I just wish that they didn't come at the expense of Daft Punk's mystique. Then again, if the point is to be rock, maybe on some totally boring level, they've succeeded admirably: What's more rock'n'roll than hitting the self-destruct button?
