Daft Punk delivers its first official album, Random Access Memories, in eight years after the Grammy award-winning electronic duo fanned the flames with endless teasers suggesting a return to music.

(This article appears courtesy of SFstation.com, an affiliate of Metro Newspaper)

With Random Access Memories, the most anticipated album of the year to date, French house musicians Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo set out to bring the human soul back back to dance music. To reach this altruistic goal, the two elected to produce the majority of the album using live instrumentation, innovative recording techniques and various collaborations with session musicians.

After dropping numerous hints of funky new material through media outlets, high-profile ads and a teaser at Coachella, the release arrives as a distinguished collection of robotic disco beats and mellow jazz fusion heavy on drum machines, modular synthesizers and vintage vocoder, and some surprisingly moody themes. The album pays tribute to music of the late 1970s and early 80s with help from pioneer Nile Rodgers, front man for multi-platinum hit R&B band Chic.

The album begins with “Give Life Back To Music,” a slow building digital guitar introduction climaxing with a familiar android voice droning prescriptive poetry. After a rocking instrumental guitar solo steers toward a slow fade out, “The Game of Love” leads us into melancholic cosmic journey that tailored more for a subdued VIP room than an all-night dance party.

“Giorgio By Moroder” begins as a musical monologue on the life of Italian disco musician and proficient synthesizer innovator Giorgio Moroder that unexpectedly turns into nine minutes of rhythmically pulsating star guitar. “Within” features android confessionals and self-reflection with a light metered beat, followed by similarly styled “Instant Crush” with Julian Casaablancas of the Strokes. “Lose Yourself To Dance” introduces adept hip hop creator Pharrell Williams, a welcome addition with simple soft chants paired with a steady funk beat, while “Touch” celebrates the half-way point of the album’s voyage with Paul Williams’ charming ballad vocals, vintage disco piano and trumpet decorated with whimsical noise effects.

Following a smooth transition, the instant the first single “Get Lucky” sneaks in eight tracks deep with the return of Pharrell’s money vocals. The pleasure-enduing song that broke Spotify streaming records to become the unofficial single of the summer clearly ranks as the brightest gemstone of Random Access Memories. “Beyond” starts the dilatory decline of fun, continued by “Motherboard” with odd space effects.

Todd Edwards provides one last lift with a reflective yet surprisingly upbeat melody on “Fragments of Time” but by the penultimate track “Doin’ It Right” featuring Panda Bear, the album’s energy dramatically begins to fade. “Contact,” the the only track that uses sampling on the album, serves as the epic orchestral conclusion with explosive drum beats .

Commendation for artistic merit feels warranted but not without slight confusion toward the generally downbeat and melancholy tone of
Random Access Memories. Dance enthusiasts patiently waiting for the release might wonder why their patience is rewarded with such somber vibes.

Although not structurally top heavy, it’s hard to believe that any tracks on the record other than “Get Lucky” will ever get steady play in clubs without a remix. Nonstop party seekers will have to look elsewhere for more inspirational rally music.

It’s been three years since East Bay’s all-girl sun-pop group, the Hot Toddies, put out their last record, Get Your Heart On, released on local label Asian Man records in 2010. Now they’re back as a trio with a five-song EP, Bottoms Up, released by Tricycle Records.

Even with the slight lineup change (keyboardist Jessica left the band), Bottoms Up still delivers a similar sound—easy-breezy, surf pop songs, boundlessly catchy vocal harmonies and dry witty lyrics about fun times and sexual innuendos. However, in the absence of keyboards, the Toddies have taken a somewhat heavier, more guitar-centric sound.

It is the heaviest tracks on Bottoms Up, in fact, that are the strongest. Opener “Jaguar Love” is a female-empowering sing-along rocker about fast cars and sex, with lots of tongue in cheek humor. Even with the distortion, there’s no lack of bubbly energy to the song. Another strong track, closer “Hey Hey,” while slower, still has a heavier sound—almost a power-ballad with a slow head-banging beat.

There has been a steady increase of retro girl group rock bands since the Toddies started in 2005, but they continue to distinguish themselves from the new crop of younger girl bands by softening up their twee elements on Bottoms Up and keeping that humor deadpan. We’ll have to wait to see what sound their next full length brings.

The Hot Toddies play the Blank Club on Saturday March 30, opening for Shinobu. Tickets are $10. The show starts at 9pm.

For five years, Cartoon Bar Fight has gone through  lineup changes, with only two of the founding members left: Kendall Sallay and Dirk Milotz. Despite the instability, they’ve mastered a few songs along the way. Following their release of their debut EP, Tell All The Children, almost exactly last year to date ( Nov. 18th), the San Jose band presents a full album showcasing songs they have long waited to present.

Beautiful, haunting melodies create a surreal, peaceful mood on CBF’s Reincarnate. Starting fresh after a previous life seems to be the theme for CBF, from their original formation to now. In a sense they have reincarnated themselves in the process of releasing this album.

The album starts with an eerie organ-like movement, “A Beautiful Death” (the same title as the album artwork by Terry Fan), and into “Dear Victoria,” a solemn song almost styled as a shanty. “Circus” continues in the same vein with a cry for change as the ending chant repeats the lyrics “I sleep too often, when will I awake?” and  “I know I’ve fallen away.”

The title track, “Reincarnate,” helps close the album with much more hopeful lyrics for life and change as heard in the chorus, “in life and death, disappear, change your shape, reappear, reincarnate” before the final song “A Beautiful Life.”

The album really shows a much darker and reflective side of CBF not present in Tell All The Children, with more musical development, instrumentation depth and richness to their songs.

Highlight Tracks: The Marquee, Reincarnate, The Kingdom Of

There’s a word for what the Lolita in Lana Del Rey suffers from—and it comes from the author of her avatar, Vladimir Nabokov—the Russian word toska,  a “sensation of deep spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause, a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning, the desire for somebody, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest levels, ennui, boredom.’

Sounds about right. On Del Rey’s prematurely panned album “Born to Die,” the theme is pure toska, and she doesn’t give us a respite from fashionable melancholy. Female pop singers seem bound by a trope. Rihanna entertains a female rape fantasy. Adele might forever be weary of love. And Lana Del Rey is trapped in a permanent state of longing. The question remains—for what?

On “Video Games,” the lead-off single performed on SNL to much acrimony, she speaks of love like a high school girl drunk off her first (fittingly) Bacardi Ice, passed out in your bed while you tuck her in and lie on the couch alone, listening to her somnambulist mumblings in the dark.

That’s not to discredit or scoff at her. Yet when the Idea of Love is being desperately foisted on you, it produces the funny sensation of remaining an abstraction. Lana loves a lot, and that’s disconcerting. Our generation seethes with extreme emotion, we express “love” and “hate” with mutual flippancy. It also becomes a little tiresome to love something that won’t love you back. Unless, of course, you thrive on the pain. As Proust said (fittingly), the feeling of love multiplies once the object of your affection cancels dinner. Del Rey’s love feeds on rejection.

She attempts something of a rap on “National Anthem,” chock full of whimsy about “drugs,” “reckless abandon,” “blurring the lines between the real and the fake.” Why am I reminded of The Hills?

Fatigue sets in at “Summertime Sadness.” Del Rey’s defeatism moves at a snails pace, when it should be frenzied and dangerous. The last track “This is What Makes Us Girls” is recollection of high school escapades, “dancing on tables,” “drinking cherry schnapps,” and wearing “ribbons in their hair”—a “freshman generation of degenerate beauty queens”—yes, this is what makes them girls, not women.