James Murphy, the leader of LCD Soundsystem, met Tim Goldsworthy in the late 90s in New York. They soon formed the DJ/producer duo DFA and began organizing parties, DJing, and producing remixes. Shortly after, they created DFA Records, a music label that would release, among others, LCD Soundsystem themselves.
On New Year’s Eve 1999, they set up a DJ booth on the balcony of their office. James broke two Mitsubishi (MDMA) pills into quarters and placed them on the corners of the turntables. While DJing and mixing songs, he was also taking Mitsubishi quarters. James felt everything was flowing so well that he decided to play “Mother Sky” by Can, 14 minutes of pure krautrock, giving him enough time to go dance to it on the floor and return. And, upon returning to the booth, to play “Mother Sky” again and go back to the floor. Musical encyclopedism, sweat, and hedonism: the LCD Soundsystem experience.
Around that time, New York felt somewhat musically depressed. Accustomed to being the avant-garde and artistic beacon of the West (punk and new wave in the 70s, hip-hop in the 80s), the city was immersed in the golden age of hip-hop, waiting to host the next great musical revolution, which in the 90s was happening far from the Big Apple (Seattle, Athens, Chicago, United Kingdom). In that fertile and hungry environment, concerts and parties followed one another in an ideal breeding ground, overflowing with young people with ideas and a melting pot of genres and origins. Among the inhabitants of that new-wave Arcadia was James Murphy.
After 9/11, with part of the city given over to revelry as a refuge for grief, James finished shaping LCD Soundsystem — a stable band for an almost one-man project — and captured that euphoric-troubled spirit, taking dance-punk to new heights of popularity. On the dance floor, under a dazzling mirror ball, James brought together David Bowie, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Talking Heads, New Order, Liquid Liquid, Can, and Suicide, among many others.
LCD Soundsystem (2005)
Expectation was enormous after the success of all the singles preceding the debut album’s release (“Losing My Edge”, “Yeah”,…), but James survives the hype. A declaration of intent from the cover: the image of a disco ball that looks photocopied to the point of blurring, a powerful metaphor for the reinvention of genres. The album kicks off with “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”, an immediate hit with one of the few cowbell solos remembered.
Song after song, the debut album traverses all the places that became the band’s identity. Synthesizers and programming dominate, but there’s room for punk (“Movement”), electronic balladry (“Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up”), and experimentation (“On Repeat”). An album made for the dance floor, sweaty and excited.
Sound of Silver (2007)
James recounts having an epiphany in a dream: the second album would have to be better than the first (a brilliant decision). With that ambition in mind, and after overcoming creative block thanks to the album 45:33 (2006) composed for Nike, James lined the studio with aluminum foil for inspiration. The production took a giant leap, revealing James’s greatest virtue as a composer and producer: the construction of song layers. “Get Innocuous!”, which opens the album, is the first example. Slow build-up: synth by synth, the sudden eruption of the metronomic drums like a drum machine, the superimposed vocal layers; everything increases the song’s dynamics without saturating it. James isn’t afraid of song length; an album of barely 9 songs reaches 56 minutes. Direct hits like “North American Scum” and “Time To Get Away” and generational hits like “Someone Great”, a digital and cosmic ballad, or the great love song that closes the album, “New York I Love, But You Are Bringing Me Down”, stand out on an album with no filler. Sharp guitars like in the best post-punk, drums that sound firm in krautrock, disco and punk (in “Watch The Tapes” there’s always room for one more gear) lend humanity to an album of machines. It sounds menacing, hedonistic, and playful. The same feeling you had at that party floats over the album: the police are about to arrive.
And then there’s their most recognizable song, “All My Friends”, with James using the template of “Transmission” by Joy Division; a contained 8-minute crescendo, gained inch by inch until the grand climax. Their best album.
This Is Happening (2010)
“You wanted a hit, but maybe we don’t do hits”, James sings in “You Wanted A Hit”. The band couldn’t shout it louder: they don’t want to live solely off hits. The songs take on a more experimental appearance, James’s voice adopts an electronic crooner’s timbre and gets so close to David Bowie that his wax wings might melt. However, he succeeds, even with “All I Want” being one of the most obvious homages to “Heroes” among the hundreds made, but also the most honest: many of us would say that “all I want” is to have composed “Heroes”.
The experimental turn, without abandoning their identity, allows them to work on songs from a perspective closer to Talking Heads‘ Remain in Light, employing polyrhythms that make the songs more multifaceted (“Dance Yrself Clean”, “Home”, or “Pow Pow”), allowing minimalist funk to take the stage.
After the album, James knew the end was near: “I knew it was the last album. I just felt it: three and done. With punk bands, the first three albums are good and the rest suck.” The band bid farewell at their peak with an epic concert at Madison Square Garden in New York on April 2, 2011. As a warm-up, four identical concerts in NY days before to combat scalping. Nearly 4 hours, 28 songs (including 45:33 in its entirety) to bring LCD Soundsystem’s career to an end.
american dream (2017)
Or not. Rumors began circulating among the music press, and in 2016 James reunited the band to headline some festivals and record their fourth album. “oh baby”, the opener of american dream, sounds like an apology, a return home on bended knee, asking for forgiveness for the betrayal and deception.
Just as we feel strange in places that were once our home as we grow older, they take down the mirror ball and confront more experimental territory head-on. The lyrics no longer cultivate sarcasm or euphoria as much as in previous albums, but rather explore fear and anguish more. We can still dance, “tonite”, but the album’s strength lies in the darkness emanating from the songs and how the whole works better with silence than with exuberance.
The elegiac “black screen” is a tribute to David Bowie after his passing. While he never hid his influence, on this album the shadow of Bowie and Eno’s Berlin Trilogy is longer than ever.
And since then, silence. In 2017, James Murphy said that no matter what, he would never again announce the band’s breakup; they would simply stop making music. As long as this limbo lasts, we will continue to speak of them in the present tense and revisit their legacy. The early century zeitgeist, songs where synthesizers play a colossal role, but which would be nothing without the human alchemy of craftsmanship: the powerful interpretation of instruments, the choirs, the claps, and even that damned cowbell that invites you to dance.
