LCD Soundsystem

LCD Soundsystem have pulled off the trick that nobody thought they wanted to see again. I hoped the Indie dance crossover had been locked in the cupboard with The Soup Dragons but what LCD Soundsystem do is to use dance music trickery with an American Punk Rock work ethic and real attention to detail. And it works.

Mainman James Murphy is half, (with Mo Wax’s Tim Goldsworthy); of New York label owners and remixers DFA. Murphy’s first band, Pony, were on Homestead, the US label that was the original home of Big Black and Dinosaur Jr. Nasty noisy uncompromising music. He moved into dance music because it was wide open and “Seemed like a great place to do something.”

LCD soundsystem was originally conceived as the opening act for DFA backed band The Rapture (who he memorably and very positively described as “Like someone had a big bag of band and just dumped it all over the stage and they'd all get up and start playing”) and he was going to use LCD Soundsystem as an excuse to play the contrary card by turning up to do DJ sets as a band and then doing band nights as DJ sets. In the Parliament/Funkadelic world that we should all live in, that’s called Who Says A Rock Band Can’t Play Funk Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Play Rock.

He originally envisaged the band as being something that nobody would like. That didn’t go to plan though as the album LCD Soundsystem came out in 2005 to fairly universal critical acclaim.

Early single Losing My Edge is a great tense sounding record that sets out the method well. It’s propelled by a synth riff that uses the rhythm of Talking Heads life During Wartime set to the electronic sounds of Marvin Gays Sexual Healing lp.

Murphy’s delivery is a caustic Fall style rant that puts the narrator, Zelig style, at the heart of a string of musical groundbreaking moments. At Suicide’s first rehearsals in a New York Loft, the dj booth at the Paradise Garage, Captain Beefheart’s first band and naked on a beach in Ibiza.

But he also knows that that “I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks. I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978”

The track ends with “I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know..... But have you seen my records?” He goes on to list a wide range of artists from Pere Ubu to Althea and Donna, The Bar-Kays to PIL, Todd Terry to The Slits. And Murphy is almost certainly a little man with a great big box of great records.

The video is just a headshot of Murphy being repeatedly slapped. Possibly by a disgruntled Soup Dragon.

Daft Punk is Playing At My House is an unbeatable title, and a funny, engaging clever record, it’s another relentless synth riff, and a jerky David Byrne vocal delivery. And the lyrics about his girlfriend working the door and the all the furniture in the garage remind me (again) of Talking Heads Life During Wartime and it’s line about “I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days”....on the face of it they are mundane lines about little details....but made to sound really important.

There’s some little echoing guitar clicks that are a bit like how The Edge plays, but cleverly the record gets to sound more and more like Daft Punk as it heads towards a monstrous electronic splurge. Terrific stuff.

Disco infiltrator is a really apt title to come from the New Jersey Punk kid and the vocal is another salute to the Mark E Smith style “Stop. You can shake the waist...aah” while the electronics bubble up the octaves, rising to the surface like a windy bottomed bath night.

What makes the records interesting is the mixture of styles, clubby electronics, post punk sensibilities and occasional raucous guitar.

He built his first studio with the help of Steve Albini who described the recording process as “Look, you just put the mic in front of it and set the gain until it's correct. You just follow the rules.” The records are well constructed though, so the Punk Rock kid has still got the studio engineers careful methods. Murphy says “If you're creative, you'll be creative once you know the rules really well.” But in contrast he doesn’t write the vocals until the day they're recorded, because “I feel like it would make them false” which is a real American straight edge Punk angle.

There are more punk versus corporate contradictions with the release of the 45 33 album in 2006. It was commissioned by Nike and released as an ITunes only download. With a running time of 45 minutes it’s billed as being written with the warm up, midpaced temp, faster intervals and cool down periods designed for an ideal 45 minute run. To the pie shop and back.