Antithesis to the truism that nobody likes a smartass, everybody likes James Murphy. He molded the most ripped, most hip sound of the decade with DFA’s crate-digging consolidation of New York’s entire dance music history. He rediscovered the platform of the vocalist as wry wit, gazzumped grump, and the carrier of message over melody (though his lyrical idiosyncracy oughtn’t be perceived as covering up for vocal shortcomings – his range of voices would put Peter Serafinowicz to mimetic shame). He even wrote shitting All My Friends. Indeed, James Murphy was the most convincing punk of the noughties – LCD Soundsystem is the most self-reliant hit vehicle going, and a law unto itself. For every Nike soundtrack on the vinyl rack there exists a Suicide-covering 12-inch.
Being still submerged in This Is Happening’s enviously deep hype cycle, the view of LCD’s third album is difficult to view in undistorted totality. The album’s first leaked taster, Drunk Girls, was gimmicky, block-headed – but then so was Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, which in retrospect is irritating in its shallowness but acted essential as a mousetrap for hostile new fans. Likewise, Drunk Girls is poohed by LCD diehards, and loved by n00bs. No matter, in album context it is less jarringly dissimilar to the rest of Murphy’s canon – it is the party song on a significantly more subdued album.
As aesthetically indecisive as Sound of Silver (which if listened to as a set of instrumental tracks would fail to cohere on any level), This Is Happening is Murphy trying to juice the very, very best song out of the multiple niches dug out over LCD’s career. You Wanted A Hit is a culmination of the sarky scenester character first encountered in Losing my Edge and the locked grooves of Watch The Tapes – on a technical level it bests both, but fails, in reality, to connect for all the contrivance. All I Want takes his Bowie/Eno adoration a step too far, pilfering the guitar line from Heroes and everything else bar the vocals from Here Come The Warm Jets – the wailing, fuck-shit-up last minute of the song redeems it in a capricious kill your idols fashion (even if that’s not the intent). Pow Pow? Beat Connection, the intergalactic dub. Indeed, only commonly-accepted woah-what-the-fuck? moment Dance Yrself Clean explores a new species of song, a sort of inverse version of The Knife’s Deep Cuts that somehow transcends even Heartbeats as a triumph of yearning, nostalgic gorgeousness, free from epochal categorization, tugging on a direct line to your emotional fiber. Every listen is a 9 minute black out.
So why not an album of 10 Dance Yrself Cleans? Because iTunes has a ‘repeat’ button. This Is Happening is certainly noble in its attempts to create a grand work, an emphatic career-definer, a definitive answer to self-posed questions. The weight of those challenges is too much for the muscular build of a band dedicated to the comparatively lighter lifting of the perfect single, but the strain is still worth listening to, owning, and for some, surely, living their life by.
Words: Daniel Gray
