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DFA · Columbia | lcdsoundsystem.bandcamp.com |
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American Dream was ranked third in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2017, and was awarded the Bronze Fox for Dilfiest Dadbod
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We’ve all been there, folks.
We’ve all had our wildly successful dance-punk outfit that hyphenated on new and fresh flavours of eclecticism every other minute.
We’ve all released three studio albums to critical acclaim, plus a fourth excellent and underrated live-studio hybrid.
Double Grammy nominations? Too easy.
Co-headlined a massive world tour with Arcade Fire? No worries.
A Pitchfork retrospective on every track in our catalogue? So relatable.
We’ve all decided our project has run its course and broken up with pomp and circumstance and a very large farewell concert that sold out Madison Square Garden, later released as a three-hour quintuple-disc live album The Long Goodbye and accompanied by a pointedly-titled documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits.
We’ve all gone our separate ways.
We’ve all moved on to pastures new, perhaps greener.
And just five years later, we’ve all realised we have another album in us.
We’d better hope it’s worth it.
James Murphy is looking worse for wear. He’s a little softer around the middle, a little greyer around the chin, a little darker around the eyes. And homeboy was no spring chicken when he first sang about the miraculous transcendental healing power of Daft Punk records and the horseshoe overlap between the crass and the pretentious. Obsolescence is the rhyme and the reason, tightly clutched in his fist from the very beginning. The very first LCD single articulated the dilemma.
“I’m losing my edge to better-looking people /
With better ideas and more talent /
And they’re actually really, really nice /
I’m losing my edge”
To hell with writing etiquette, I want to show you some more.
“I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets /
And borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties /
But I’m losing my edge /
I’m losing my edge, but I was there /
I was there /
But I was there”
Fear not, I’m getting to the new album, but I’d like to spend a moment longer unpacking ‘Losing My Edge.’ It’s such a fascinating window into the mind of a fascinating man, as a song, as a beginning point, as a statement of intent for the future of LCD.
This single features the inaugural deployment of Murphy’s signature stream-of-consciousness mumble-rants, unrehearsed, spouted directly into the microphone for the first and only time. But where the libretto suggests creeping bitterness, his mockery is withholding: surprised, confused, genuinely impressed.
“I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagara record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit. 1985, ’86, ’87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good sixties cut and another box set from the seventies.”
And even when not speaking in paragraphs, he refuses to escalate.
“I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables /
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars /
I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know”
Slowly, Murphy unspools, abandoning any pretence of argument, lapsing into a blank-eyed tirade of band names, grasping at straws to prove that he is still relevant, that he has value, that he shouldn’t be passed over or usurped or forgotten. Not yet, at any rate.
Murphy mixes a heady cocktail: eight minutes shifting between irritation, anxiety and apprehension.
So all these years later, where are we?
James Murphy is now forty-seven. He’s slipping down the tail end of middle age. His life is half over. The good news is that American Dream is the best work of his career. The bad news is literally everything else.
Let us address the elephant in the title. America was never what people believed it was. Since November, the country’s ill-gotten reputation has been stamped into the mud, and will not recover in our lifetimes. It has metastasised into a ceaseless waking nightmare, dedicated to realising every conceivable permutation of malice and ignorance and hatred and idiocy.
So in the glaring light of such a colossal implosion, how do we continue? How can we possibly keep on keeping on if one day, each of us will be as dead as the American dream?
James Murphy has no idea.
James Murphy thinks that doesn’t have to be okay.
James Murphy is raging against the dying of the light.
James Murphy is sound and fury, and who gives a damn what it signifies, it is loud and it is there and it exists and it will all eventually be forgotten, rotting cold in the ground, and it still means everything. And so it is with newfound urgency and drive that LCD Soundsystem have risen from the grave and returned to the subject of obsolescence.
No one steps in the same river twice, said someone famous probably. It is not the same river, and you are not the same person. There is much to love about the previous LCD canon. Dry wit and drum machines took them far, but never before has their work sounded so cohesive. Like a long thin Tetris piece slotting into an empty space, the simple addition of new clear-eyed context has sparked a connection, a vital connection that snaps the whole thing into sharp, poignant focus.
And the same can be said for each of the ten tracks, clearly partitioned, like primary school fiction only massively more depressing, into an orientation, a complication and a conclusion. Each song establishes a simple repeated figure, then gradually layers on more and more elements, accents, decorations, ostinati, tracing a single continuous crescendo suggestive of Maurice Ravel’s perpetually polarising Boléro. (A piece that some loathe with a burning passion, but which I adore.) Every new fragment builds on the last and foreshadows the next, until a final element drops from above and pins everything into place. American Dream is the product of careful, loving, precise construction.
The album opens with a steady ticking rhythm, the kind that jackhammers itself into your brain so hard you can hear it for hours afterwards. A warm, offbeat bassline upsets the consistency, finding itself reflected in an icy treble register, moving in the opposite direction as though through some great celestial mirror, an ocean in the sky. ‘Other Voices’ and ‘I Used To’ build up to frenzied instrumental exorcisms, one a boiling synth line, the other a blazing guitar. James Murphy shares some choice observations about the disbanding and expeditious reunion of the band — creatively drained, too old for the lifestyle, pre-emptively internalising accusations of cynical cashgrabbery — but decides that none of it is important. He tears open the curtains, and a floodlit chorus declares, simply: “you can change your mind.”
With a clatter of military percussion, the album’s centrepiece ‘How Do You Sleep?’ portends violence. The tatters of a ruined relationship flutter viciously in the salty sea wind. An echo from deep within the crystalline mix: “Standing on the shore / Facing east / I can’t feel you.” As the nautical metaphor ebbs away, the arrangement starkens heavily. The music dilates, while the focus contracts. “Standing on the floor / Facing you / I can’t see you.” Murphy finds himself trapped in a glassy Sisyphean loop, endlessly repeating: “One step forward / And six steps back.”
The next track along bears the closest resemblance to old-school LCD, crisp and brisk and immediate and bitter. Time away from the spotlight has lent Murphy a new perspective on what’s ruling the airwaves. (“What remains of the airwaves,” he quips.) “Everybody’s singing the same song / It goes: ‘tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight’ / I never realised these artists thought so much about dying.” His knottier musings cut deeper with each new sardonic stanza. “We’re all wild / Except for you / You know who you are / This is a love song” he jabs, warning that “you’re missing a party that you’ll never get over.” Murphy would know. He’s missed quite a few.
Though it is possible for a party to rock dangerously hard. Radiohead hard. Circa OK Computer hard. ‘Call the Police’ begs for adult intervention. I’ve never heard a plea for sanity (or — hark! a pun! — for a safe, familiar, good, old band) sound so thoroughly unhinged.
Then the title track lumbers in, an horrific waxy abomination. Some unassuming fifties rock and roll ballad has had its skin melted and smeared, as though by third-degree burns. Murphy’s morning-after comedown brings with it an existential crisis.
Had it featured on any previous LCD album, ‘Emotional Haircut’ would have been a welcome moment of levity. But an old dog trying out a new trick to general contempt is so much sadder now.
Finally, the album draws to a close as Murphy remembers a friend.
“You couldn’t make our wedding day /
Too sick to travel / […]
I owe you dinner, man /
I owe you something”
‘Black Screen’ is a eulogy for David Bowie. Murphy and his lead synthesiser keep getting in each other’s way, interrupting one another, stepping back, bumping together and withdrawing again. “I’m bad with people things / But I should have tried more.” He never got around to taking Bowie up on his offer of musical collaboration, and now it’s too late. “You could be anywhere / On the black screen” he laments. “You could be anywhere.”
For a quiet moment, a coda extends into the dark. An impressionistic piano figure dances around the gentle pulse of an analogue synthesiser. A dial tone, and the chirrup of a phone that will never be answered.
On American Dream, everything is coming to an end. Relationships are crumbling, memories are fading, illusions are dissipating, and it can’t be helped or fixed or postponed. Making music cannot stem the tides of time. Divulging anxieties, however cathartic the experience may be, does not fix or heal or remove them — they can only be loosened so much, matted and clumped with age, beyond untying. LCD Soundsystem are not as young as they used to be, which wasn’t that young to begin with, tired and haggard and buckling under the ever-increasing weight of fatigue. That’s all American Dream has to say, but that’s a heck of a lot.
Medium-term upward trends are no consolation for entropic decay on the personal level (my own long, slow, inexorable decline into senility has already begun — a single grey hair is sprouting impetuously from my left temple. I accept your condolences) nor indeed from a cosmic perspective (the inevitable heat death of the universe still looms large over the distant future).
Art alone does not solve problems. Art alone cannot recork actual fucking Nazis. The joy is to be found in seeing that other people can see what we see.
LCD don't have the answers.
But if, after everything, James Murphy can still get out of bed every morning, so can we.