FEATURE:
Daft Punk Is Playing at My House
LCD Soundsystem at Twenty
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I am going to come to some features…
and reviews about LCD Soundsystem’s extraordinary debut album. One of the best debut albums of the past twenty years and, in fact, one of the best albums of the past twenty years, it does celebrate its twentieth anniversary on 24th January. Because of that, I want to spend some time with an album from a great band. Led by James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem was nominated for the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Electronic/Dance Album. Perhaps its best-known single is Daft Punk Is Playing at My House. I would guide people to features like this. That was published in 2014 and is a track-by-track guide that celebrates ten years of LCD Soundsystem. I want to move to a couple of features about LCD Soundsystem’s amazing debut. Even if this note of caution that says it is not as good as the albums that followed it (their fourth, American Dream, was released in 2017). I want to start out with a 2014 feature from Stereogum, who marked a decade of a classic debut album:
“The reason I use “formal opening salvo” is that LCD, and James Murphy in general, had been kicking around for a few years prior to the release of LCD Soundsystem, and in ways relevant to the early ’00s NYC scene. Having played a key role in the Rapture’s “House Of Jealous Lovers,” Murphy and erstwhile DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy fleshed out the whole “dancepunk” notion that’d run alongside the early ’00s rock resurgence, and also gave us one of the era’s most memorable and iconic songs. LCD, as a more specific project for Murphy, actually debuted in 2002 with “Losing My Edge,” which, of course, is one hell of an opening salvo, one towering song simultaneously showing off and eviscerating all manner of musician/music nerd/hipster tropes. (Given the context that Murphy was living and working in NYC, the whole thing has kind of an unspoken but specific interaction with notions and posturing of NYC cool in general.) And there were a few more amazing singles to follow, my personal favorite being “Yeah (Crass Version),” which is one of those all-encompassing listening experiences that seems to take total control of your being each time you hear it, no matter how many times you’ve heard it before. These singles were collected on a second disc for LCD Soundsystem, which is such a weird thing for a debut album: Here’s essentially a double album, with a bunch of songs that have been released before but could’ve been as totally new as the first disc to a lot of people who bought the record. And, damn, if that was the case for you, this is some overwhelming stuff: Who the hell is this guy who came out of nowhere with this strong debut album and this other disc that functions as its own kind of album, too?
The power of what Murphy had achieved already being re-packaged with his new, full-length debut actually weakened the music on LCD Soundsystem for some critics. At the time, some people argued he still wasn’t an “album” guy, that he was really good at single songs that maybe sort of didn’t necessarily come together into one cohesive whole. People still talked, a lot, about how Murphy wore his influences on his sleeve, but they seemed a bit more forgiving of it for them than they had been for some of his immediate NYC predecessors, because, I guess, this dude is just undeniably good at making sounds, and he’s just undeniably good at tastefully aping those influences. And while there’s a whole other thing to be said about that influences bit (more on that below), the part I’m somewhat more sympathetic to is the idea that Murphy hadn’t totally arrived as an album artist.
This is a hindsight thing, but, yeah, LCD Soundsystem doesn’t reach the heights of Sound Of Silver or This Is Happening; not only because there were still songs like “All My Friends” and “Someone Great” and “Dance Yrself Clean” and “I Can Change” to come, but also because those were proper, brilliantly cohesive albums. That’s not to say the first album doesn’t have its classics and its gems. There is, of course, “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” and “Tribulations” and “Movement.” Whenever I hear people talk about one of their favorite lesser-known LCD tracks, the psych-pop exercise “Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up” is a forerunner. Personally, it’s “Great Release” for me. There is an unsettling power to that song if you listen to it in times of mindless transit: a crowded subway commute, the sterility of passing through a nice airport, the monotony and trance of a drive you’ve taken too many times. There’s this drift to it. In its way, it’s a gorgeous coda to album, a final refrain that does seem a definitive stopping point. But in another way, it feels like it suggests something else to come. It’s not like the lyrics are full of hope and laughs, but musically it sort of ends LCD Soundsystem on a bit of an ellipsis, too.
And that’s the thing: There’s something about LCD’s debut that does feel like a sketch for what came later. In its day, it was plenty powerful. Then we saw what else Murphy was capable of. I was at the last two LCD shows, and in the spring of 2011, six years after the release of LCD Soundsystem, “Tribulations” and “Movement” and “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” were entirely different animals live, flexing new muscles and new textures alike, welcomed into the more fully realized identity of LCD Soundsystem that Murphy had continued to build in those interim years. For every amazingly accomplished and confident early outing like “Yeah” or “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House” or “Losing My Edge,” there were tracks like “Thrills” and “Disco Infiltrator” and even “On Repeat” (another LCD deep cut favorite of mine) that seemed a bit half-there in comparison. These were strands that hadn’t yet been totally collected. On the next two records, Murphy would take all his disparate elements and blend them more thoroughly, more deftly, into a fuller sound. In the context of LCD’s career, there is a thinness and unrefined quality to LCD Soundsystem. There might be classic songs littering the LCD canon from 2002-2005, but soon Murphy would come back with two classic albums in a row, and his debut can’t stand up to that stuff at all as an album.
Don’t get me wrong: This is still music I love. This is a great album to have in existence. It’s just hard to remember what it was like when this was the only LCD music out there. It’s so easy to have it overshadowed by what came later, and especially the narrative of this project, steadily rising in quality and popularity until Murphy suddenly just decided that was it — at a point many would call, let’s say, premature. And, to me, another part of that narrative is: LCD Soundsystem is one of the most important artists of the 21st century so far. Conversations of authenticity and derivativeness, of chasing some new sound vs. bearing your influences too clearly: These things are of course always floating in the atmosphere, but how muddled and/or irrelevant do they feel in 2015 vs. 1995 or even 2005? If you look back at those initial LCD reviews, you can tell the writers are still reeling from a million Strokes copycats, copies of a copy of a copy, etc., etc. And that show-off/evisceration balance of Murphy cataloguing his record collection in “Losing My Edge” practically invites a critic to dissect where this or that LCD sound came from.
There’s something different going on with LCD Soundsystem, though. Curation and homage were woven into the very nature of Murphy’s music. LCD’s music raises questions of authenticity and derivativeness, it can lead to interesting conversations about those topics. But it also came along and, if you ask me, obliterated a lot of discussion about it all at a moment where that was a big part of the discourse in the indie rock world. You know, who’s going to stop James Murphy if, after giving us “New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down,” he felt like giving us “Heroes” and calling it “All I Want.” The thing that makes Murphy one of the luminaries of his era is that his music captures the way we think and perceive and consume in the 21st century. I want some of this, some of that, a few of those things, and I’ll carry them all with me, and sometimes it’ll result in some new mix of those things that I hadn’t thought about before, and sometimes it’ll just wind up sounding a lot like a really famous David Bowie song. So it goes”.
I know there will be features and articles around LCD Soundsystem ahead of its twentieth anniversary on 24th January. I want to move to a 2020 feature from CRACK. If some feel their debut did not scale to the same heights as albums that followed, there is no denying the fact LCD Soundsystem hit upon something. A distinct sound and set of lyrics that resonates with people in 2005:
“By the time their self-titled debut arrived via Murphy’s own DFA Records in 2005, LCD Soundsystem were already a formidable live band and the most vital export of a scene that melded dance and rock music from a new, DIY angle. Acknowledging this reputation, the album simply collected some (then) new songs on one disc and a number of live favourites and 12-inch singles on another. It’s an urgent record that feels almost non-canon compared to their ambitious, emotionally rich work later on.
LCD Soundsystem’s best tracks are snotty, tense and feel as indebted to Murphy’s love of The Fall as his later immersion in disco culture. With the stock price of irony, sarcasm and white-male listmaking at an all-time low, LCD Soundsystem could arguably feel even more inaccessible in 2019 than in the mid-noughts, when the band were, at worst, an easy punchline for those keen to wipe the smug look from the face of the emerging wave of Pitchfork hipsters. Even then, few could resist the bassline on Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, nor the refreshingly diverse group of NYC oddballs they revealed themselves to be, as they ripped through clubs and festivals with the sweat and attitude of a genuine punk rock heritage
Murphy, a keen student of popular culture and a sensitive soul, would later wisely balance the band’s more acerbic streak with the likes of Someone Great, Home and All My Friends – vulnerable anthems that now dutifully serve as cathartic tearjerkers at millennial weddings. Back on LCD Soundsystem, it feels as if the band are struggling to decide whether to expel or embrace the acidic tendency. Murphy’s awkward clarification that the trendy ghouls he mocks throughout Losing My Edge are “actually really, really nice” is funny and self-aware in a manner that is exquisitely them.
For all Murphy’s laser-focus disses in the direction of “art-school Brooklynites in little jackets,” LCD Soundsystem finds him mercilessly documenting the underwhelming life he’s about to leave behind. On the underrated and pleasingly lethargic Never As Tired As When I’m Waking Up, he attempts a charmless seduction (“When I was a little boy, I laid down in the grass/ I’m sure you’d feel the same, if I can fuck you here tonight”), whereas the cultural stock take on Movement is far from hopeful. “It seems the punk rock as an experiment, well it pulled up lame,” observes Murphy, a self-appointed “fat guy in a t-shirt doing all the saying”.
These nuggets of self-deprecation are sometimes lost in the live arena, where Movement remains a gnarly, pogo-inducing highlight of the band’s pristine set. Yeah (Crass Mix), a repetitive, escalating jam built around the band half-heartedly intoning the word “yeah” is still a knockout, a timeless classic in the sphere of what we might have once called ‘indie-dance’. It’s pure ecstasy, and revelatory of the amount of energy bubbling throughout a scene that was at least sincere in wanting to see club culture and the ever-present threat of “borrowed nostalgia” in a very different way. Revisiting LCD Soundsystem, you may find yourself glad that Murphy dropped the act. But you’re still reminded that, when administered in the right direction, a little cynicism can go a long way”.
I am going to end with a couple of reviews. The first one is from the BBC. It is quite a positive review, though there is that sense that it was like nothing else. People not quite sure what to make of it. Only in years since has LCD Soundsystem been given the credit it deserves:
“James Murphy, the man who is LCD, has earned himself a tidy reputation in recent years. As one half of production duo DFA he's produced some of the more trendy bands to come out of New York. The Rapture and Radio 4 have both felt the benefit of his disco punk sensibility.
He's probably best known over here for 2002's Losing My Edge, in which an ageing hipster (Murphy, obviously) rants about his cool muso credentials over an addictive and perversely simple bass line. It couldn't help but make you smile.
And what we have here is two CDs of James' own stuff and yes, let's get a little excited over it. He's a generous chap as the second CD sports the Soundsystem's singles so far, including Losing My Edge, Yeah and Give It Up: top tunes for fine art students to do hoovering to.
This leaves the first CD to live and breathe as an album proper. It's the length of an old vinyl record (45 mins), with nine tracks on it. There's even a slow track at the end, the very Eno-like Great Release.
And yes, the hip references are all there. Can, Gang of Four, Prince, The Fall, PiL etc - the cool stuff from the NME Hall of Fame. Murphy is witty and funny and knows what's good about the music he likes. He doesn't sound cynical, just knowing and aware - and he definitely knows how to play the cow bell.
His lyrics are often more spoken than sung, but his voice has an engaging weediness - sort of nerdy and aggressive at the same time. You can't really sing lines like "Daft Punk is playing at my house" anyway, though there is a pleasant lyricism to the druggy melancholy (in a late-period Beatles style) of Never As Tired As When I Wake Up. At one point I even found myself looking for the lyric sheet, but that might be taking things a little too seriously.
So, all in all a toe-tappingly good album and much more engaging than the music he's produced for other people. Pop may have eaten itself, but its s*** can still smell mighty good”.
I am going to end with a review from AllMusic. I am going to be interested to see what sort of articles will come soon as we head towards that twentieth anniversary. How James Murphy sees the album. LCD Soundsystem is a remarkable piece of work:
“If a music-nerd version of Animal House set in 2005 is ever made, "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" -- the boisterous opener of LCD Soundsystem -- would make an ideal theme song for the fraternity on which it is based. The self-conscious, awkward music obsessives pledging into this fraternity would have to pass a complex trivia test, own a compulsory list of records, and, as a hazing ritual, ask to dance with someone in public. If LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy were the least bit open to the concept, he could be the fraternity's advisor. Judging from a handful of singles and this album, he'd be more than qualified. His first A-side, 2002's "Losing My Edge," laid all his cards on the table, name-checking nearly everything that has been branded indispensable by a record store clerk during the past 20 years. This is someone who clearly owns tons of records and cannot escape them when making his own music. Acid house, post-punk, garage rock, psychedelic pop, and at least a dozen other things factor into his songs, and he's not afraid to be obvious. On occasion, he doesn't even allow fellow nerds to play guessing games. This is the case with "Never As Tired As When I'm Waking Up" -- drowsy/dazed John Lennon vibes through and through -- as well as the drifting/uplifting "The Great Release" -- an alternate closer to either of Brian Eno's first two solo records. Otherwise, Murphy's songs cough up references from his subconscious or are put together as if he's thinking more like a DJ, finding ways to combine elements from disparate sources. "Movement" careens into high-energy guitar squall after a pounding beat and cranky synths; "On Repeat" happily replicates the scratches and jabs of guitar heard from A Certain Ratio, PiL, and Gang of Four, but its mechanical pulse and curveball synth effects couldn't be any more distanced from those three groups. Nothing here exceeds the brilliance of "Beat Connection" or "Yeah." Like just about everybody else these days, Murphy's more skilled at creating isolated tracks than making full-lengths, even though this particular full-length has few weak spots and unfolds smoothly as you listen to it from beginning to end. The bonus disc, containing all the stray single tracks, adds a great deal of value”.
On 24th January, it will be twenty years since LCD Soundsystem was released. No doubt an album that has inspired so many other artists, if you have never heard it or not heard it in a while then make sure you check it out. It is a wonderful debut album that deserves to be embraced by a new generation. Even if many critics feel LCD Soundsystem was bettered by future albums, there is no denying the 2005 release was…
A mighty fine start.