Daft Punk

Daft Punk's members prefer not to show their faces in public. In concert, they don Lite-Brite leather robot suits and LED robot helmets, mixing their music from a platform in the middle of a giant pyramid on stage. They give interviews with their backs turned to the camera, or with burlap sacks over their heads. They release pictures, but with their faces digitally obscured. This combination of shyness and mystery has helped generate a massive international following for the Parisian electronic duo, who have been mixing, sampling and creating music together for 20 years.

Their newest album, Alive 2007, is a recording of a live performance in Paris last June, a career-spanning show featuring all of their well-known songs mixed together in immensely pleasing, beat-thumping new ways. Though the album cannot recreate the complete concert experience-the pyramid, the robot costumes, the laser displays, the ecstasy-it redefines the musical capabilities of a band that, in recent years, has been accused of becoming stale and repetitive.

The first song leaked to the masses, "Harder Better Faster Stronger (Alive 2007 Radio Edit)," is actually a combination of two songs on the album, and it exemplifies the renewed sense of creativity that is infused throughout. Mixing four tracks seamlessly and maintaining rhythm while switching beats, "Harder Better Faster Stronger" entices you with two songs you know, while introducing you to two you may not have heard. This trend sustains the album, and draws the listener's attention to the group's overall work, reinvigorating songs that were poorly received on earlier albums. The penultimate song "Superheroes/Human After All/Rock'n Roll" is a perfect example of this technique, sampling Barry Manilow and featuring songs that were overlooked when individually released, but in unison become any rave-goer's wet dream.

Anyone who is familiar with Daft Punk's music will peruse the track list of Alive and salivate. Some inevitably better than others, the tracks fit together-within themselves and as a whole album-to yield this enigmatic duo's greatest release yet.