Daft Punk

The fact that electronica duo Daft Punk has recorded a live album called “Alive 2007” begs two questions. One: why should we care about their bleep-blooping in general? And two: what’s the point of a live electronica album, besides pointing out the performance’s inherent irony? (Yeah, we get it: you’re two humans making “live” robot music. That’s funny.)

With regard to the first question: because they’re popular and they’ve affected popular culture. Daft Punk has been bringing electro to the mainstream for the last ten years with their largely inoffensive and sometimes-boring dance beats. Hip-hop has hooked on—listen to Kanye’s “Stronger” or Missy Elliott’s “Touch It.” Not to mention that they played at James Murphy’s house.

And then there’s the hipster cachet: that they perform in a triangular spaceship. That they only appear publicly in space helmets. That they’ve crossed over into the A/V world with “Interstella 5555” (a Japanese animation scored by the “Discovery” album) and their latest film, “Electroma.”

Their hypervisual, intergalactic performances are, in effect, reversals of the music video form—they make videos that come to life.

But “Alive 2007” is all music, no spaceship—and Daft Punk still succeeds. Recorded in their hometown of Paris—which they had avoided for 10 years—the album opens with a drawn-out tease: an electronic voice bleating “ro...bot” clutters up against a stuttering, indecipherable set of syllables.

It accelerates; the mess of noise coalesces and the previously unintelligible word turns out to be “human.” The human-robot combine escalates in tension until Daft Punk finally offers release, serving ”Robot Rock” straight up.

“Television Rules the Nation / Crescendolls” is the highlight of the album, hitting its hardest when fans expecting the song “Crescendolls” instead get it mixed together with the more intense sound of “Television.” But unfortunately, the combo of “Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger” is a letdown.

It’s hard to improve on what are likely the two most popular songs Daft Punk has ever created, but it’s even harder when they’re layered over a standard ’90s techno melody.

The genius returns in the pounding thrill of songs like “The Prime Time of Your Life / Brainwasher / Rollin’ & Scratchin’ / Alive,” which bring out the power of some of the less popular tunes of the Daft Punk corpus.

The new magnetism they create with overly repetitious “Steam Machine” and “Brainwasher” makes this album an effort at redeeming themselves after their last subpar release, “Human After All.” For all the flack that “Human After All” got for being made in a skimpy two weeks, “Alive 2007” shows why we should still love Daft Punk—because they can create something like this out of something like that. And because the impulse to say “I can do better—way better,” is so utterly human.

So finally we return to that second question. Why did Daft Punk record an album of performance in front of 18,000 dancing humans? For the same reason they recorded a live album in the first place. As they put it: it’s amazing what you’ll find face to face.

Their creativity reaches its peak in the context of defying expectations with spectacular, surprising mixes—something only possible with a giant audience filled with fans, not a tiny gathering of hipsters. For Daft Punk, the more, the better—for them and the music.

—Reviewer Elsa S. Kim can be reached at elsakim@fas.harvard.edu.