“Let the music in tonight / Just turn on the music.”
In April 2013, I saw a promo video for this album and immediately fell in love with the song Get Lucky and (this rarely happens these days) bought the CD on the May 17 release date. That's how much I was digging Nile Rodgers' disco scratch guitar, Pharrell Williams' vocals, and Nathan East's funky bass lines. My anticipation was ramped up by a 8 episode web series with the album's collaborators:
I bet those studio dates were a musician's dream. Collaboration and innovation with a nod to the past. Sure this album was over-hyped, but I wasn't disappointed in my purchase and this thing remained in my truck's CD player for the entire summer. Faithful readers of this blog know my disdain for Auto-Tune technology, but the groove is so good on these tracks that I'm able to overlook that.
Music from this album won 5 Grammy awards and highlighted the awards ceremony. Metacritic has this scored at 87, which I consider to be just a bit high. Don't get me wrong - it's good, but at 75 minutes, it's a little long. Imagine what a taut 45-50 minute album this could have been (and is in my own iTunes configuration: tracks 1, 6, 11, 3, 8, 9, 12, 10 ).
Update: In its 2020 list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Rolling Stone ranked Random Access Memories at #295.
Peak on the US Billboard Top 200 chart: #1 (2 weeks, June 8 - 15, 2013)
Tracks: The best song on the album (and the best song of summer 2013) is Get Lucky. I also like Give Life Back To Music, Giorgio by Moroder, Lose Yourself to Dance, and Fragments Of Time. I like parts of Touch, but the slower parts make me hit the skip button.
Personal Memory Associated with this CD: see above
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