Pop Albums: Daft Punk - Homework

Virgin CDV 2821

French duo Daft Punk's take on techno strips away any artistic pretensions to leave just a jackhammer beat and a few squelchy noises looping over and over. They've been compared with The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, but there's a gulf separating the British crews' compositions from these thumpingly single-minded tunes.

Thomas Bangaltar and Guy-Manuel De Homem Christo may list the likes of Brian Wilson and George Clinton among their "Teachers", but there's more to it than that. The typical Daft Punk track opens with a blurry sample, which is gradually equalised into legibility while drum parts and perhaps a bleep or two of synthesiser noise are added. Five or six minutes later, it stops. Sometimes, there are vocal bites: the list of influences in "Teachers", or, in "Around the World", the title repeated for seven minutes. May get better.