First Impressions: Daft Punk's Random Access Memories

The way to listen to one of the year's – maybe decade's – most frothed-over albums is definitely in a soundproof cube of frosted glass containing only a sofa, a neat row of bottled waters, a larger-than-life size cut-out of Chris Brown, and something that looks suspiciously like a black box recorder cabled firmly to the floor.

Rather than your writer's desperate last utterances, having found herself locked in here supervised by – alongside Brown – a mural of Pink and a photo of a levitating Beyonce, this shackled plastic cuboid contains Random Access Memories, Daft Punk's fourth studio album that's been six years in the making, and the cause of the kind of frenzied internet hype not repeated until Ryan Gosling Won't Eat His Cereal. The Skinny has 80 minutes of private communion with the kind of powerful soundsystem that Sony MDs must employ ritually, at lunchtimes, to brainwash staff into kneeling before Brown's reinforced cardboard silhouette, and a short window of time four days later to write up our impressionistic notes, which, looking back, convey an exponential increase in lucidity and enthusiasm as we approach the completion of our first coffee, and progress from sensible homilies like 'pleasant, measured call and response' to simply 'PANDA BEAR' in all caps followed by a row of hearts, and – angrily – 'terminal velocity.'

It's nigh-on impossible, of course, to review a 70-odd-minute odyssey that careens madly through as many styles and ideas as it does tracks in just an hour and 20 minutes – especially when a good half of that slot is dedicated to hitting repeat on Instant Crush, aka The One With Julian Casablancas, which is so, so perfect it's almost agony to listen to. But basically, Random Access Memories is equally fucking bonkers and disappointing – though how could it have been anything else? – swerving from sub-Get Lucky suavity (opener Give Life Back To Music, the nicely unmatched handclaps of Lose Yourself To Dance, both feat. Nile Rodgers) to sad, animate vocoder ballads (The Game of Love, Within) via melodramatic space-age apocalypsos (Contact) and something that combines waggles of honky tonk piano and Rocky Horror melodrama to approximate an early draft of Alton Towers' Haunted House queue music (Touch).

When it's not good, it is, at best, attention-confounding and scatty (Motherboard), at worst – frankly – a bit boring (Fragments of Time). But when it's good, it is, of course, superb. The pinnacle is Giorgio By Moroder, a jawdropping, jigsawing, vertebraic epic, where Moroder himself recalls – firstly over a background of crowd chatter and jars clinking, then tessellating synth, then tearjerking orchestral acrobatics – how he was turned on to music but never imagined he could pursue it (“The dream was so big that I didn't see any chance...”), how he adopted the synthesiser, and how he eventually lost himself to a particular sound and a feeling (“Once you free your mind about the concept of harmony and of music being correct, you can do whatever you want.”) And fuck, maybe it's just the serious hifi equipment, but the eruption of strings (later echoed on Beyond, with its sparkling MGM fanfare) is absolutely mind-bendingly, transcendently glorious, and the way Moroder's spoken word is very occasionally, very very subtly tricked into syncopation with the beat, so that it fleetingly, momentarily has a rhythm, gives the listener one of those precious, tight twinges of satisfaction felt right down in the gut.

Panda Bear makes a star turn on singalong Doin' It Right, which almost has the properties of a chorale: Noah Lennox's round, yawning vox – warm and opalescent with the camaraderie of festival sunsets – plait themselves into the offbeats of DP's flirty, cutesy autotuned refrains, braiding a big, colourful friendship bracelet of a song. The aforementioned Instant Crush couldn't have a more apt title: it takes The Strokes' trademark chopped pace, slicks it into a wistful chorus and adds an aggrieved guitar solo to produce a sort of compressed, condensed dusk lullaby. Casablancas' vocals have been treated to a point where you'd expect them to be unrecognisable, but it's Casablancas, so of course it's like you've had this song buried somewhere inside you since forever. A sugar-almond coat smooths over any and all of his scuffs and dents; his voice is unsullied, glazed, eggshell-faultless, yet it's him alright, that keening, somehow-lovelorn-yet-indifferent-at-the-same-time tone impossible to replicate.

Finally, Contact – which contains the only sample on an apparently otherwise fully analogue album, from the Apollo program – is gargantuan. A bristling, ugly, gurgling world's end disco that wouldn't sound out of place on Alive, it basically mangles and tramples all over the previous hour of svelte but forgettable funk, cabaret calypsos and tearful robots, swallows it, digests it, and shits it out. Mission? Accomplished. Probably.

Now just wait seven more days. YOU CAN DO IT.