Homework

Daft Punk | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (March 25, 1997)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Virgin Records Us
• ASIN: B000000WCV
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Music
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (170 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #128 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #2 in Music > Pop > Euro Pop > French Pop
  • #2 in Music > Dance & DJ > House
  • #5 in Music > Dance & DJ > Electronica

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

After rocking the suburbs with the infectious and persistent "Da Funk" (with its amusingly pointless Spike Jonze video), Gallic pranksters Daft Punk unleashed Homework, an album that combined everything good about house music with everything bad about French pop and changed the face of dance music in the process. The sound of production duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Homem is a raw and dirty collage of cheap drum machines (wired for maximum swing) welded to endless filtered loops and embellished with everything from guitars to talk-box vocals. The beats are lifted straight from the Chicago House textbook, but the simple bass lines and catchy hooks make a listenable pop song from what would normally be a stripped-down DJ tool. Uncompromising yet totally accessible. --Matthew Corwine

Product Description

CD

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Still my favorite album July 29, 2000

By Kyle Lumpkin

Format:Audio CD

4 years ago, I was walking around the campus of Ohio State University and I went into a record shop. In the little headphones on the wall, this album was playing. I liked it and so I bought it. I play it at a few parties and everybody starts to like it--people are playing it at parties from their own copy. Now, 4 years later, I've listened to a lot of hardcore dance music and Daft Punk is still way up on top. Reviews describe it as low-tech but good. I describe it as a record that had more thought put into it than 99% of others I've heard. It's intense. I recommend it all the time. Listen close, you'll probably hear it mixed in to the music at the techno clubs where you live. "Oh Yeah" is the worst song I've ever heard though. [e-mail]

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Da Funk November 24, 2003

By Erica Anderson

Format:Audio CD

I remember first seeing the music videos for "Da Funk" and "Around the World" on MTV (believe it or not) several years ago and just being completely blown away by the infectious dance beats. "Around the World" in particular really grabbed me by the jugular. It is by far the catchiest dance song I have heard in the past decade, next to Kylie Minogue's "Can't Get You Out of My Head". The bass-heavy beat is incredible. Listening to "Around the World" brings back memories of me dancing (drunkenly) to this song in the nightclubs back in my college days. "Da Funk" was and still is equally cool in its own right. It is extremely catchy. I just love the synthesized beats. Just like "Around the World", "Da Funk" has that incredible deep bass hook that gets you on the dancefloor. As much as I love Daft Punk's follow up "Discovery", "Homework" has to be my favorite of the two cds. Granted that "Homework" lacks the warmth of "Discovery", "Homework" has a raw, live feel that its predecessor lacked. "Revolution 909" reminds me of something I have heard during my journeys to Chicago back in the day and my friends and I would be cruising to our favorite nightclub with the radio cranked up, and this song would be on the airwaves (more like a song with the same beat). I also love the shimmering techno track "Indo Silver Club" as well. Despite being seven years old, "Homework" still holds up to this very day which is not an easy task to do because trends comes and goes in dance music but "Homework" is an exception to that rule and it still sounds fresh and new to me.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The one element many other bands lack February 22, 2002

By A Customer

Format:Audio CD

Now first of all, I'm the kind of guy who likes just about any music. There's probably at least one artist in every genre that I like. But for every band that I love to listen to, there's a hundred others like it that I can't stand.

What's the difference? I've thought about this for a long, long time, and I've come up with one word: Groove. Groove is the difference. To me, groove is the undefinable ability of a composer to find a collection of sounds that, despite anything else that can be said about it, is simply fun to listen to. It's the kind of music that gets stuck in your head because it's so gosh-darn cool that you just can't help yourself. Any band that can groove will probably be great. Any band that can't never will.

This album proves that to make great music, you don't need the most hi-tech equipment, you don't need a whole lot of musical talent, you don't need more than a few instuments, but if you can put them together with groove, your songs will be catchy, cool, and oh-so-intoxicating. Daft Punk (which is arguably a fairly untalented group as far as the usual standards go) has certainly accomplished that with Homework - - sometimes I'll turn on "Around the World" or "Da Funk" and let it repeat for hours on end because, although it's the same thing over and over and over, it's such a cool groove that I keep wanting to hear more of it!

Grab this little gem and pop it in every so often to remind you that great music is more about how it makes _you_ feel than about whether or not the music is surprising or repetitive, tweaked or raw, talented or hacked.

Is this album high-quality stuff? No. Does it groove? You bet your toosh it does!