The Riff’s Album of the Month — Year End Selection and Celebration

Give life back to music: Sunday, December 10, 4PM EST!

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The Riff

5 min readNov 15, 2023

“People Dancing” Image from by Trinity Kubassek on Pexels; “Matrix Background” image by Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels

2023’s final Riff Album of the Month selection possessed me in pieces, like fragments of a fading fever dream. Despite featuring vocals on nearly all the tracks, upon cursory listen, it felt like an instrumental excursion. The propulsive rhythms punctuated by impeccably placed flourishes and detours provided an ideal aural backdrop for working or writing, so that was primarily how I deployed it.

Episodically, the occasional element would penetrate my flow state — a choral crescendo, an infectious series of robust hand claps — commandeering my full attention. I’d turn up the volume and pause my task to listen. With each spin, such moments grew more frequent. My breaks got longer, as I’d find myself re-starting songs to listen with undivided attention to all that led up to the magical moment that lifted me from labor’s drudgery. That’s part of the album’s technical wizardry. Often you don’t realize it’s building to (or dismounting from) something until it happens.

As a result of my gradual acclimation, my memories of the album are unreliable. My alternative timeline renders me particularly susceptible to the tricks of space and time that mind and music are prone to play. Returning to it, I was surprised to find that several songs, including two of its definitive ones, were positioned differently in the track order than I remembered.

The album has been on my mind for a few weeks because of how well its motifs align with so much of what we’re grappling with today. However, I didn’t think it matched the sole criterion I had established for my next Album of the Month pick.

Because my previous picks were both new releases, I decided my next choice would be a classic. I refuse to call an album a classic until it’s at least ten years old. In my mental timeline, this month’s album fell somewhere in the 2015–2016 space. I even have vivid memories of people, places, and moments from that window that are now intertwined with the album.

Imagine my surprise when a visit to Wikipedia confirmed that it actually came out on May 17th, 2013. That not only makes it “eligible,” but ripe for a discussion of its standing in the 21st-century canon. It also begs discussion about what makes a classic album in a moment when music is inherently disposable, and the very concept of an album feels archaic. Can a project rooted in nostalgia for a previous era — the boogie nights of the late ’70s and early ‘80s — eventually become an article of nostalgia for its era? Or will we ultimately cut out the middleman and simply return to the source material?

The recent announcement of the group’s retirement also adds a layer of finality. It begs us to examine this particular work as the capstone to a uniquely constructed body of work that, as a whole, feels like an exploration of humanity, technology, and the coexistence of the two that define 21st-century life.

True to its name, this album feels like a non-linear collage of misty water-colored memories from the exhilarating but ultimately failed quest to appropriate humanity the group so dynamically set to rhythm and melody on its previous 3 outings. Yet, at its core, it’s a celebration of music, life, and whatever it means to be human in a particular moment.

The album was a resounding commercial success, going platinum or multi-platinum in over 20 countries and generating one of 2013’s most-played singles. Critical acclaim was in no shortage either. The album landed on numerous year-end lists and was later named one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums. It completed the group’s transition from cult favorite to industry darling, notching 5 Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year.

It’s an apt work with which to close out 2023’s Riff Album of the Month discussions because it’s salient to many of the issues to which we’ve spoken throughout the year:

Genre constructs
Nostalgia
The role of production and engineering
The ways in which music both shapes and reflects cultural moments
The changing relationship between music and fans
Perhaps most urgently, the impact of technology on all of it

With A.I. poised to alter the nature of humanity as we know it fundamentally, this month’s selection feels like snapshots of the past captured through the digital lens of a once future that’s now present. With moments elusively fleeting, it raises the question of how much of humanity is shaped by our memories and how we access them.

Please join me in remembering, even if for the first time, The Riff’s November/December 2023 Album of the Month:

Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

Who should come? Anybody and everybody!

Do you love Daft Punk? Do you have your own memories, random access or otherwise, tied to this album? Not familiar with the record, but intrigued by the idea of exploring it with fellow music fans?

We’d love to have you all!

A lot of exciting new voices have graced the pages of The Riff and Plethora of Pop this year. You’ve added so much to the community. We’d also love to have your insight, analysis, humor, and heart in the Album of the Month discussions.

You can talk as much or as little as you want: hold court center stage, or keep your camera off and discreetly share your written takes via the chat window. There are no “wrong” opinions here, just different points of view, adding layers and shading to our understanding of music.

I also hope to see all the regulars, semi-regulars, and irregulars to round out the year: Terry Barr, Anthony Overs, Steve Goldberg, Jessica Lee McMillan, Charles in San Francisco, Nicole Brown, Stanley C., Madeline Dovi, Hope Bill Helps (and/or any YouTube characters who might feel inclined to crash the party), Buddy Gott, Charlie Cole, Christine Carmichael