Daft Punk Alive 2007

Never mind the fact that Daft Punk have only three studio albums and they’ve decided to focus their attention on this live album — already their second in ten years. Anyone in attendance for their recent string of inconceivably awesome gigs will appreciate this live set in order to relive those magical 90 minutes that radiated from their giant pyramid spaceship. Recorded at Bercy in Paris this past June, the duo’s set-up of Ableton Live software, MIDIs and Minimoog Voyagers allowed them the freedom to do virtually anything with the source material. The set list is a pretty standard one, which they stuck to throughout the summer. Opening with the vocodered "robot/human” back-and-forth spiel, it breaks into a "Robot Rock/Oh Yeah” hybrid, which then mutates into their "Technologic” and Swizz Beatz’s "Touch It.” It’s moments like the explosive distorted beats of "Television Rules the Nation,” the gonging bells in "One More Time/Aerodynamic” and the climaxing thrill of "Superheroes & Human After All & Rock’n Roll” that do it for me. Of course, a live audio recording is still lacking one of the concert experience’s main draws — the giant stage, the blinking robots, the fanatical dude next to you losing his marbles — but considering its quality easily trumps all of the bootleg sets surfacing online, this is a must. A special edition of this will come with a bonus disc featuring the encore, which if memory serves, is well worth the extra bucks. (Virgin)

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