James Murphy started releasing dance music some time between "B.O.B." and "Get Ur Freak On". It was a golden age for modern pop, a period during which a lot of personal aesthetics crumbled. Indie wasn't a dirty word, but it was a meaningless one. Pop, though, wasn't just more meaningless, it was more everything. And for the first time in a long while, pop also had its evangelicals; people who could argue convincingly in its favor, and who knew how to contextualize it interestingly. That turnover period was an exciting time; the ideological tension, the feeling that something was at stake, the exuberance of redrawing your bounds. The habitual mixtape maker in your life probably remembers it well.
Despite eventually remixing Britney Spears and N.E.R.D., Murphy never had a hands-on relationship with pop. Nonetheless, his transition out of punk and into dance music ran concurrent with this modest revolution, and it's pretty much impossible to separate his epiphanies from ours. That early LCD tracks like "Losing My Edge" used to feature in playlists alongside, say, "Work It" or "...Baby One More Time" only reinforces the link. So it's fitting that the finest work of Murphy's career is an album that sits squarely at the intersection of all those careening ideologies. Sound of Silver, his second as LCD Soundsystem, is as close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.
These days, there isn't as much to talk about. It feels like less is up for grabs, as if music fans are gripped by a general fatigue. I'm not sure if you rapidly skim the same articles as I do, but apparently 72% of the internet is now made up of free mp3s, while another 14% is accompanying blurbs. Sometimes, I don't know how you guys do it. We're besieged and stupefied enough by downloads and mixes and remixes and mashups and collections of songs masquerading as albums that an album that feels like an album strikes me as positively ideal right now. Thankfully, Murphy-- a self-confessed 1970s rock nerd who grew up in the heyday of art-rock and albums as Statements-- unapologetically sets out to make dance records that breathe like proper albums.
In that respect, Sound of Silver isn't far removed from LCD Soundsystem's eponymous 2005 debut, which ultimately tried to do the same thing but fell slightly short. While Sound of Silver makes no bones about Murphy's well-known appreciation of Brian Eno's pop vocal affectations ("Get Innocuous", "Sound of Silver"), the Velvet Underground ("New York I Love You"), or new-wave ("Watch the Tapes"), it never feels like a paste job, but rather just the well-considered work of someone connecting the dots between the past and the present.
There's not a single weak track here, and many more already feel classic. "Sound of Silver" is a seven-minute suite that morphs from a rumbling, ice-cold, no-wave groove into a liquefied jumble of kalimbas, pianos, and fizzy synths. "All My Friends" begins with a piano riff that sounds not unlike a speeding train (or, at least, Steve Reich's approximation of one) and rolls downhill into fireworks. And then there's the song that precedes it, and with which it combines to form the record's center. A sleek, delicate, and effortlessly melodic sliver of electro, "Someone Great" is my favorite song of the year so far, and constitutes new ground for Murphy both in terms of prettiness and poignancy. It's about loss, but the lyric remains tantalizingly ambiguous. As with most great songs, its best lines buzz around the edges of the story: "The worst is all the lovely weather/ I'm stunned it's not raining/ The coffee isn't even bitter/ Because, what's the difference."
Murphy used to court spontaneity by refusing to pre-write any of his lyrics before going into the vocal booth, claiming in interviews that they were all ad-libbed. It's a strategy he's evidently abandoned on Sound of Silver, and the record is much better for it. On "All My Friends", for instance, he tackles a favorite subject (getting older) from the wrong end of an all-nighter: "You spend the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again." On "North American Scum", he tackles continental divide with straight deadpan: "Well I don't know, I don't know where to begin/ we are North American/ And for those of you who still think we're from England / we're like... 'No.'"
When it's all said and done, Murphy's real legacy to dance music will be his production sense. He's an analog obsessive with a general aversion to software, and Sound of Silver reflects that. Far removed from the compressed, trebly, and overmastered paradigm that's gripped electronic music in the last decade, Sound of Silver sounds deep, spacious, and full-blooded. (Like, um, an old rock record.) It's an absolute joy to listen to, for every possible reason, not the least of which is because, these days, those epiphanies feel like they're coming fewer and farther between.
