THEY, ROBOT

As reclusive as Kraftwerk, the dancefloor duo behind Daft Punk have built expectations up for their new album. The long-awaited result is harder and darker than expected, writes Jim Carroll

ALL in all, it was a good day's work for research scientist Homer Dudley of Bell Laboratories. Looking at ways to improve telephone communications in 1939, Dudley broke speech patterns into components to be transmitted over a narrow bandwidth before being reconfigured at the other end. Dudley called his new invention the vocoder (voice operated recorder) and went home for his tea.

Dudley would smile with contentment if he could only hear the new Daft Punk album. Sure, every self-respecting experimental electronic musician has embraced the vocoder at one stage or another as sonic shorthand for a futuristic, robotic sound. But it's Daft Punk who are the true believers in the transformational power of the vocoder.

Above all else, the vocoder provides a great disguise - and camouflage plays a central role in the Daft Punk story.

Never ones for providing conventional photos when robot poses could do the job just as well, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo have extended similar mystique to every corner of their operation. Minimal media interaction and a paucity of live shows means we know as much about the pair now as we did when their début album, Homework, arrived in 1997. As the huge anticipation which greeted 2001's Discovery showed, we're just as keen to know more about the duo because of their unerring knack for signposting new directions for the dancefloor.

While Discovery neatly polarised opinion, it also sold 2.6 million copies, proof that the sleek rejigging of classical rock synths, soft metal guitar riffs and aerodynamic daftness that produces such smashes as One More Time will always find favour with a large chunk of the population.

Since Discovery's release, the pair have maintained low profiles, with just a remix album and the lavish Interstella 5555 film (featuring wonderful anime videos to all the Discovery tracks by Leiji Matsumoto and his Toei Animation team) taking care of business.

But, despite the Kraftwerk-like reclusiveness and confining creative output to their Roulé and Crydamoure labels, speculation and intrigue about Daft Punk's activities continue nonetheless. Given dance music's endless quest for something - anything - new and exciting, eyes inevitably swivel every couple of months towards Paris.

After all, an act which produced such masterpieces as Homework and Discovery (or indeed the genre-defining Music Sounds Better With You from Bangalter's Stardust in 1998) will always be accorded suitable respect and occasional homage. Not for nothing are LCD Soundsystem boasting that Daft Punk Is Playing at My House on their new album. You'll be waiting a while before cutting-edge hipsters say the same thing about Mylo.

Should Daft Punk turn up to play at anyone's house in the next few weeks, it will be tunes from the new album, Human After All, which will command attention.

Recorded over a period of six weeks last autumn in Paris, the album is a step backwards to a pre-Homework frame of mind. The beats and grooves are sparse and streamlined, bereft of any glitter or gold. While the vocoders and synths do what we've come to expect of them, the digitised flash which dominated Discovery has become a folk memory. It's quickly apparent that there are no One More Time boom tunes to be found here.

But such retro-robotic minimalism means there's a lot to commend in this new Daft world, with two tracks in particular cutting considerable mustard. Steam Machine may sound as if it was created by Kraftwerk during their Tour de France cycle, yet it maintains a distinctively Daft Punk yelp from start to finish. Make Love is a slender, floaty slice of electro-pop which is all the better for its triumph of detail over drama.

Throughout, it's a harder and tougher Daft Punk than we've been used to, the duo preferring to transform simple, gritty beats into barnstorming techno workouts than pull out their shiny pop suits. Surprisingly dark and occasionally snarling, Human After All has the look and sound of a work in progress, an album which might have benefited from further tweaking.

Yet, as the pair seem to wish to remind us with the album title, their days of seeking to morph into machines are at an end. What you see now is what you get, and the machines can take a back seat. The vocoder, though, still gets top billing.

Human After All is released on March 11th