LCD Soundsystem - "This Is Happening"
Duda dudda duda thwak. Duda dudda duda thwak.
I can't dance. I don't go to dance clubs. But I love knowing I'm listening to a dance cut that is exactly right. The beats laid down by James Murphy and company pretty much define what joy sounds like. They dare you not to dance. They pump through your nervous system and your blood stream like life's essence itself. The beats are designed to make you happy. But like the best dance music, from Rose Royce to Iggy Pop, the groove exists in a complicated world.
James Murphy has claimed that This Is Happening is the final word from LCD Soundsystem. The previous two albums each featured at least one song hilariously bathed in nostalgia. The genius cuts ‘Losing My Edge’ and ‘New York I Love You (But You're Bringing Me Down)’ both belied a sense of loss over a New York City seemingly lost to time while acknowledging today’s kids trying to make their own voice in a radically changed urban landscape. The nostalgia here has evolved where it need not be mentioned. The album itself feels like Murphy has taken his TARDIS back to the place where Paradise Garage and the Mudd Club still exist. Where Bowie and Eno-era Talking Heads play on freeform radio. And yet it feels like the right record for this exact moment and I think that's because Murphy has hit on a universal constant for the city of New York.
Everyone who lives there is completely neurotic. Budda dudda dud dah. Budda dudda dud dah.
A complicated world: A lover in a relationship defined by one fight after another declares "I can change if it helps you fall in love." (This after declaring love a murderer, a hearse, a curse, and a "verse of bad poetry.") Another lover declares "All I want is your pity. All I want is your bitter tears." (Oooo laaah lala….) The pulsating rocker ‘Drunk Girls’ sounds at first like an obvious misogynist joke. Instead it throws a curve ball and really indicts the drunk boys who "steal from the cupboards" while drunk girls in fact "have the patience of a million saints." Ingeniously, drunk girls "know that love is an astronaut. It comes back but it's never the same." But while Murphy indicts the clueless boys, he admits that the girls give them too many tries.
The album also yells out its messages like barroom advice. The opening number is called ‘Dance Yrself Clean’ and it moves from a smooth synth groove to screaming rock while essentially giving the titular command from one weary person to the obnoxious person he can't live without. ‘One Touch’ features the repeated line "people who need people are just people who need people." So much for being lucky. It doesn't feel like an accident that Murphy is an Irish guy from Brooklyn. He has the cynicism of Joyce. He likes to dance and he knows how to make you dance to his drum machine but he somehow feels the pain and exasperation of the people crowding the floor.
The album ends with what may already be the song of the summer for me. ‘Home’ is nearly eight minutes of uplifting transcendent grooviness. It is a pep talk and literally a "safe home" to anyone who's made their way through the whole party. "Grab your things and stumble into the night so we can shut the door on terrible times." And yet he declares and questions: "Under lights we're all unsure, so tell me what would make you feel better." It is a song about trying to divorce your past and count your blessings. It's a song about holding on to good memories. Twenty-four hour party people "afraid of what you need. If you weren't, I don't know what we'd talk about." On the surface, it's just a great endlessly happy sound. But that sound surrounds and hugs like a squeeze machine or a tab of Ecstasy. A big Xanax for Murphy’s fans.
Nothing made me happier recently than walking through Chelsea listening to ‘Home’ on my headphones and then removing my headphones to hear it blasting from a car radio. Bidda bidda ba deh. It's already an anthem. Thank God!
Is this the best LCD Soundsystem album? I'm not sure. But it already feels familiar and timeless. There isn't a boring moment on the album. There isn't a synapse that it won't touch. And eventually it might feel too familiar. Out of the trilogy, this is the record I expect to be played for years to come. In ten years, I expect to be waiting for a show to start (oh God help me if I'm still doing that a decade from now but anyway...) and hearing the riffs from this album over club's PA systems. I think I can live with that eventuality.
So if this is an instant classic, why isn't it a 10? Well, it might be. But I don't dance. So I listen to it on trains, at my desk, here at home at my workstation while I write. And I can't move to it. And I'm jealous and resentful because of it. So I'll take off about one bomb due to my own failings: the prerogative of another neurotic New Yorker. Feel free to fill up the rating to ten if you're one of the people who will be dancing yourself clean.
