Tuesday 18 May 2010



QBiM SPiNS: LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening

James Murphy, can we be serious for a moment here?  I’m finding it extremely difficult to understand what’s going on when you keep making wisecracks and and self-references that teeter on the edge of self-depreciating and self-congratulatory.  It’s even harder when, in between those wisecracks, you show a vulnerability and humanity that transforms LCD Soundsystem‘s music revelry to revelatory.  Just what the fuck are you up to?

“Drunk Girls” like to file complaints it seems, but you’ll find no complaints from me when you turn an acerbic eye on the scene that built you up (like you did on “North American Scum”).  In that song you say that you’re heartless, but in “I Can Change” you want us to dance with you until you feel alright, into the lover’s light, begging us to hold you, cling to you, while you’re soaring falsetto carries the tune somewhere no Depeche Mode-alike song has ever been able to go before.  Really, Murphy, you’re swinging me around like a cheap baseball bat at an overstuffed pinata: one tap and you’re sending all my innards flying across the backyard.

This Is Happening is the LCD Soundsystem album to end all LCD Soundsystem albums.  It has the grace of a ballet dancer and the groove of a break dancer.  It slaps my face and tells me it loves me.  It makes me dance and it makes me cry and sometimes I cry when I’m dancing.  When each song is over, I want to hit repeat and listen to it all over again, but I want to hear the next song just as much.  They repeat on themselves like the best dance songs usually do, but you move these songs and guide them in a way that makes them open like delicate night blooms, so a song never ends up in quite the same place that it started.  “You Wanted a Hit” is a fantastic musical journey through the entire LCD Soundsystem experience, but lyrically, it leaves me saddened that this may just be the end of it all.  Are you sure you won’t be our baby anymore?   Is this really what’s happening here?

Look, Murphy, it the rumours are true, and this is it for LCD Soundsystem, I just want you to know a few things.  I thought that debut album was a bit too long, in an overkill kind of way.  Sound of Silver was better, and “Someone Great” was something spectacular.  It’s because of that song I dropped 15 pounds (well, the song and an elliptical machine, but really I couldn’t have done it without both).  And lastly, if you’re being honest when you say “this is how we do hits”, then This Is Happening is a hit–a “best record of the year” kind of hit– and it stings in a good way.

Stream: LCD Soundsystem This Is Happening
Myspace: LCD Soundsystem
Facebook: LCD Soundsystem
Twitter: LCD Soundsystem





by J. Di Gioia | Comments Off

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010 at 9:00 am and is filed under QBiM SPiNS, Stream. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Comments are closed.