About five years ago, indie rockers began to rediscover the pleasures of rhythm. Punk funk, as it was called in the seventies and early eighties, made a return, and New York bands like the Rapture and their production team, the DFA, started making tense, repetitive dance records that drew from both disco and rock. In 2002, James Murphy, half of the DFA, released a record under the name LCD Soundsystem called “Losing My Edge,” a comic monologue told from the viewpoint of a hipster who knows too much about music for his own good. “I’m losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978,” Murphy sings. “I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.” While the DFA started getting big commissions—including an unfinished collaboration with Britney Spears—LCD Soundsystem became a real band and started playing live. And something funny happened: LCD Soundsystem turned out to be more than a joke.
Live, LCD Soundsystem is sweaty and aggressive, anything but ironic. Murphy shouts his catchphrases and plays a cowbell as if he’s dreamed since boyhood of being the world’s best cowbell player. Though LCD’s self-titled début album did not capture this feeling, the band’s second album does. “Sound of Silver” (DFA/Capitol) is a magnificent realization of an idea lurking inside “Losing My Edge”: what if that hipster loved all the music he was name-dropping? LCD Soundsystem’s starting point is a syncopated, one-note pattern, played on any number of instruments, over which Murphy performs a comic Sprechstimme that occasionally, but not often, veers into melody. The band will worry away at a rhythmic conceit and then open up into a louder version of it, with everyone shouting together. There is a marvellous, bristling energy in this music, which steals strategies from German rock, Steve Reich, and lots of obscure disco records you need know nothing about. Murphy is an unexpectedly empathic master of ceremonies, yearning to spend time with all his friends, and cautioning those who mourn their lost youth to remember “the feelings of a real live emotional teen-ager” and to “think again.” ♦
