In 2005 the French dance-music duo known as Daft Punk seemed to be in a slump. After two brilliant and hugely influential CDs, the members, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, had disappointed fans with a third album, “Human After All,” that sounded relatively rote and uninspired.
The French dance-music duo in robot helmets.
Fans at the Daft Punk show, which was the last stop on the group's North American tour.
Fans getting into the Daft Punk moment during the show at Coney Island.
But since then, Daft Punk has staged a spectacular comeback, one that’s all the more impressive because the duo has released scarcely any new music. And on Thursday night, at the last stop of their brief North American tour, a sold-out crowd at Keyspan Park in Coney Island gathered for a euphoric celebration of the Daft Punk legacy.
In recent years, the shadow of Mr. Bangalter and Mr. de Homem-Christo has grown harder to escape. Their raucous but rubbery tracks have influenced a generation of younger producers. (The club-conquering duo Justice, also French, sometimes sounds like a Daft Punk tribute act.)
You can hear traces of their robodisco in hits by Madonna and T-Pain. The dance-punk band LCD Soundsystem paid tribute with a track called “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House.” Busta Rhymes used a Daft Punk song, “Technologic,” as the basis for his 2006 hit “Touch It”; Kanye West sampled another Daft Punk song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” for his new single, “Stronger.”
Add to that Daft Punk’s current tour, as well as a new film, “Electroma,” that the pair directed, and the fact seems inarguable: it’s 2007, and Daft Punk is bigger than ever.
Certainly they looked pretty big on Thursday night, installed at the top of a pyramid like the all-seeing eye on a dollar bill. Assuming it was really Daft Punk: as always, the men wore their robot helmets (one gold, one silver), so there was no way to know for sure.
No way to tell, either, whether they were unleashing each blurt and bass line or merely nodding in time to a CD. (Photographs online seem to confirm that the pyramid is full of synthesizers and sequencers, just as you might hope.)
On either side of the pyramid were grids that looked like moth wings, or maybe a pair of inverted diamonds. And all night, fans were mesmerized by an ever-evolving light show. Sometimes everything glowed green, in a loving tribute to old-fashioned vector graphics. And sometimes the surfaces filled with multicolored pulses and lines, giving the stage a sweetly psychedelic makeover.
Perhaps some fans were waiting for a glitch or a mistake or an awkward segue; some imperfection to prove that this was a real, live performance. But it was easier — and infinitely more rewarding — to simply lose yourself in the flashing lights and sublime sounds.
Mr. Bangalter and Mr. de Homem-Christo are every bit as meticulous as you’d expect two androids to be. Like a couple of mischievous D.J.’s, they chopped up vocals and rebuilt beats, using samples of their own songs to tease the crowd with hints of what was to come.
At one point, they matched the vocals (by the pioneering house-music producer Todd Edwards) from their twitchy R & B song “Face to Face” with the jittery beat from “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” And during “Technologic,” they used the monotone refrain — “Touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it, turn it, leave it, stop, format it” — to anchor the track, then kept switching the rhythm, briefly quoting the beat from Busta Rhymes’s remake.
The show started with a computerized chant: “Robot. Human. Robot. Human.” And beneath this goofy dichotomy, there’s a clue about what makes Daft Punk tick. The men love playing with the extremes of dance music: repetitive beats and dreamy vocals; faceless D.J.’s and beautiful divas; science and sentiment. Sentimental songs dissolve into abstract patterns; abstract patterns dissolve into sentimental songs. “One more time,” the duo’s most famous chorus promises, but it comes around again and again.
Maybe this tension helps explain the intense reaction to “Human After All.” When these two followed their abstract, techno-driven debut, “Homework,” with “Discovery,” a gorgeous and unexpected foray into soft-rock and R&B, fans detected a narrative: machine music had given way to human music. The hits and misses on “Human After All” ruined that narrative. There was no evolution, no devolution, just a collection of tracks. The story dissolved, leaving behind only beats and sounds.
Or maybe it’s useless to try to rationalize an underwhelming album. In any case, the newer tracks held up well next to the old ones on Thursday night. In the bleachers and on the field, 12,250 revelers found a familiar but effective way to reconcile the thrill of the unexpected with the pleasures of predictability, combining robotic repetition with human exuberance: they danced.
