Daft Punk manages to be all things to two people: the drunken partygoer and the electronic music aesthete. Providing aural brain teasers for the latter and a chance to discover new rump-shakers for the former requires some serious Venn diagram technique. Alive 2007, a live album recorded in Paris last June, is a worthy addition to that sweet overlap.
All of the tracks are mash-ups of two or three Daft Punk songs, with clips from other songs sprinkled throughout. The best tracks, like “Too Long/Crescendolls/High Life,” tag team to fill each other’s gaps and threaten, combined, to be better than their individual parts.
The band squanders a potent union between two of its flagship songs in “Around the World/Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” The wavering refrain of “Around the World” is unsettling, and “Harder” strips away another layer of the band’s humanity with each vocoder blast. But the way Daft Punk plays them on the CD, the partnership is as exciting as listening to someone play one song, hit pause halfway through, then play the other.
Another Daft Punk trademark, “One More Time,” fares better in “One More Time/Aerodynamic.” Stealing energy from “Aerodynamic” means ditching its greatest flaw: the overlong slow part that can only be properly danced to underwater. Sped-up and cut apart, it loses its emotional resonance, but that’s not what Daft Punk’s best at anyway.
Sometimes the band promises to let the audience rest only to renege, as in the deceptively calm beginning to “Television Rules the Nation/Crescendolls.” This relentless pursuit of a throbbing beat makes for a reliable, if sometimes monotonous good time. Alive 2007 provides what Daft Punk has built its reputation on: an excuse to dance that you’ll still be pleased with and puzzling over the next morning.
