Daft Punk - Random Access Memories

After more than three years in various studios around the World, around the World, the fabulously talented robots from Paris have succeeded in re-imagining one of the most beloved and most reviled of musical genres, Disco.

Now, it's important to realize at this point that dance music in the 70's wasn't the relentless, synth driven music you may have stayed up up all night 'til the sun dancing to, it was instead relatively puny love songs accompanied by bass, drums and guitars. The only synthesizers you were likely to hear were providing gimmicky sound effects designed to titillate.

After all the only musicians who took the synthesizer seriously in the 70's were rock musicians, so you can imagine what Giorgio Moroder's dark, powerful synthesizers did to dance music. They essentially turned it into Disco music.

But Random Access Memories isn't a Disco music history lesson, or is it? After all the genre wasn't one dimensional by any stretch. Different types of music all contributed to pre-Disco dance music such as vaudeville, honky tonk, broadway musicals you name it, and Daft Punk go to great lengths to represent all of them at one point or another, like a kind of guided tour through time and space, deftly manipulating it all into a huge diamond disco ball.

The metal music men are ably supported on this fourth studio album by talent both new and not so new, foremost among them Nile Rodgers who can do things with a rhythm guitar most rhythm guitarists can only dream of, and he does it better than ever throughout Random Access Memories. Next up is Paul Williams who really pulls out all the stops on "Touch", destined to become your favourite song of all time if you ever felt sorry for HAL 9000.

Several of the performers are actually featured on a series of videos called The Collaborators released prior to the album, each one of which gives a unique insight into the making of one of the best albums of 2013, if not the decade.

Rating: 992,429 (out of a possible 1,000,000).