In Daft Punk's 2003 animated movie Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, the French electronic twosome turned its 2001 album Discovery into a retro-futurist parable about an outer-space rock band exploited by evil record-company earthlings. Now Daft Punk are taking the next aesthetic step: Human After All is a concept album about technology and how it threatens to turn us all into robots. Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo exaggerate their band's own robotic tendencies here, much to the detriment of its grooves. Downplaying disco in favor of deliberately cheesy Eighties rock, the duo mostly repeats rather than elaborates its riffs. Although cuts like "Robot Rock" begin with promising processed-guitar motifs, nothing builds to achieve the prior glories of "Da Funk" or "One More Time." Daft Punk may have become the victim of their own animatronic satire.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."