Daft Punk Discovery (Virgin America)

Daft Punk

Discovery (Virgin America)

Just how goofy do you have to be to incorporate a mid-Eighties hair god guitar wankfest into your so-groovy-it-hurts dance epic? Pretty goddamn goofy, baby, which aptly describes Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Mauel de Homem-Christo, better known (or unknown; the pair are given to snarky disguises) as Daft Punk. That they're French says a lot right off the bat. Parisian-bred house music hit the map with all the force of an atomic soufflé when these punks released their first album, Homework, four years back; it was a spot of silly, Eurofunk fun in a sea of phat-beat-overkill. This second outing is, if anything, even more annoyingly giddy, part retrofitted late-Seventies disco trash, part silly Gallic smorgasbord, and part tongue-in-cheek genius. Trust me, it's nothing if not fun. The spank-my-booty-and-call-me-un-mal-chien sass of "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" makes you want to chuck the clothes and vacuum the living room in the nude (with the shades up, no less!), and the radio-friendly-unit-shifting vocodeine of "One More Time" is simultaneously pure drivel and pure, frothy fun. If I owned a swanky motorboat and had some digs on the French Riviera, you can bet this is what I'd be listening to while gunning my throttle and maiming tousle-haired wakeboarder-boys in those white-sand shallows. Okay, sorry, but Daft Punk can do that to an otherwise unfunky fool like myself. Daft Punk: Banishes rainy day blahs and makes housecleaning kicky! What more could you ask for?