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Comment by sparkling | Hacker News Reader

I found their last few albums to be rather weak, lacking innovation. Who knows, maybe in a few years after a break they can get back together with a fresh mind and produce something great.

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They've recorded a total of four albums (five counting the "Tron: Legacy" soundtrack)

Congratulations, you found the "everything they did after Homework sucks" snob.

I think it's a little more complicated than that. Human After All was widely panned on release (and in my opinion remains very hard to listen to), but then was "rehabilitated" by the Alive 2007 live album. And Random Access Memories always felt like it lacked the energy of their earlier work, sort of like lounge music. Just one opinion, but not necessarily snobbery.

I feel like Alive should count even though its not new material. It's so good and different take on their own tracks.

I know that music taste is subjective, but Random Access Memories is a masterpiece.

I think a lot of people were expecting more of the electro that they pioneered and got turned off by the heavy disco influence.

Electro / disco is not the right dichotomy, as their music has always sat at an intersection between genres. Homework, Discovery, and Human After All are all heavily sample-based, and there are like 1 or 2 samples on all of Random Access Memories. That is the big difference.

Which is (in my opinion) "innovation". An innovation not everyone agreed with.

Instead of sampling from the 70s, they used artists that created music during the 70s.

I think it goes deeper than that. They practically defined the 2010s electro genre, with heavy use of aggressive synthesizers, drum machines, and vocoders for nearly all the vocals. RAM was cleaner, more understated, and very, very slick. You could be forgiven for thinking it was a completely different band. Of course all interpretation of musical genre is subjective. :)

It probably depends on how old you are. When I was rounding out my 20's and still going to clubs, Homework dropped, I listened to it so many times (but looking back, that album was kind of inaccessible to most unless they were already techno-heads). And then 2001 and Discovery, which I'd personally consider their magnum opus, and everything after that is just kinda meh for me except for the TRON remixes (which figures, since I'm an 80's kid).

I upvoted you because people shouldn't be downvoting you for having a different opinion. People, downvotes are for low effort comments, not because you disagree!

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