If, as James Murphy claims, This Is Happening turns out to be the last LCD Soundsystem album (or the last before an extended hiatus for the moniker), perhaps we should be grateful. For one, he is departing on a high note, leaving us begging for more. And for another (and more controversially), he is offering more of the same, with few modifications to the surface area, and difficult-to-grasp modifications to the deeper meaning (which was usually a lot of surface, anyway). If this suggests that I find LCD to be empty and repetitive, then allow me the opportunity to then insist that no one in the last decade has done his fusion with finer clarity, better chops, or greater impact—dubbed by some to be dance punk, but is really just wry, conflicted dance music that’s not always easy to dance to even when you really want to.
Even if it lacks new tricks, the old ones still frequently impress mightily. His penchant for masterful slow build epics (“Get Innocuous,” “Losing My Edge”) are still initially daunting, slowly unfolding and building until, by the end, you can hardly even recognize how it metamorphosed into the beast before you. His midsize exercises—the ones in the five to six minute range like “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” and “North American Scum”—remain manageably urgent but evasive in economy from start to finish. And those that come and go with expediency à la “Movement” and “Watch the Tapes” are still minor diversions, allowing for the only worthy excuse available for why Murphy likes to ramble on and on so very much. This Is Happening is sixty-five minutes but only nine tracks deep, so temptations to label so many extended exercises as aimless rise each time one hobbles out the gate, and then promptly disappear after they gather steam and floor you. And, since the quickies are almost always the least arresting moments on any LCD disc, asking for more that get to the point faster and tarry off even faster proves to be impossible.
There’s only one jam on here that hovers around the three-and-a-half minute mark, and it’s none-too-surprisingly the album’s weakest cut. It’s also more-so-surprisingly the album’s first single. Called “Drunk Girls,” it’s delivered at such a ludicrously goofy pitch that one can only assume it is meant as parody, but the words don’t embrace such unabashed glee. There’s promise in the chant of, “Just ‘cause I'm shallow doesn't mean that I'm heartless, just ‘cause I'm heartless doesn't mean that I'm mean,” but without any arc to its trivialities, they wind up being, well, trivial. It has all the cheerful insignificance of Beastie Boys’ similarly-named “Girls” with the tart pop hooks of Ric Ocasek, but all that exuberance can’t mask the fact that, for all of Murphy’s strengths at creating long, enveloping dance-friendly jams, this sub-four minute cut starts to get stale and repetitive before it finishes.
Before we get there, though, we begin the disc with “Dance Yrself Clean,” featuring a deliberately thin, tacky beat and a distant, fluttery melody rattling around to engulf slowly instead of charging in full throttle, much like the “Innocuous” entryway to Sound of Silver. Unlike the Silver opener that began piling on the elements, however, “Dance Yrself Clean” pulls in the listener with three suspiciously muted minutes of murmured mentions of “present company” and “aah-aah”’s before leaping up the decibel pole and jarring the speakers with jackhammer drums and steel-edged synths (I turned up my volume to accommodate the muffled beginning only to get my eardrums jolted like that famed Monty Python prank). Later, “You Wanted a Hit” also takes its time to emerge a grabber. The cut employs a chintzy Oriental melody at the outset, but disappears after two minutes for a more standard-issue thump-and-throb beat. That intro initially seems entirely superfluous until it is incorporated back into the rhythm some six minutes after that. The very fact that “Hit” can stretch for so long but remain engaging is one of this group’s greatest assets.
Most of This Is Happening follows the LCD formula for its obvious influences and abnormal advances beyond the adulation—long, spacious motorik-meets-Moroder compositions with modern touches that influence but don’t infringe. Murphy and his gang of art-chic misfits have an inherent specialty for drawing in the listener with calculated time and measure. I remember how two minutes into my first sampled LCD track, the much-gushed-over “Losing My Edge,” I began wondering what all the fuss was about, but by the time the sixth rolled around I couldn’t even think of such things because I was too swept up to resume rational thought. If this new record showcases Murphy’s affection for certain European stylistic heroes even louder and clearer than before, it requires greater attention to unearth exactly what he’s thinking or how he’s trying to make us feel. Subtlety is a lost art in this style, but some attempt at esoteric inscrutability is the best way to fashion one’s reaction to “Somebody’s Calling Me” and “All I Want”—they’re just not as absorbing as we’ve come to expect (or at least hope for).
The closest Murphy comes to reliving the emotion/sentiment pull of his finest Silver cuts are on “One Touch” and “I Can Change”—not too coincidentally, this album’s two greatest triumphs. The former manages the difficult feat of combining the call-and-command repetition of typical dancefloor jams (“One touch is never enough/People who need people, to the back of the bus”) with something more truthful, even yearning (“I don't think that we will be pleased with this/We have waited for a long time/I recall the promises made to us/We've been patient for a long time”). On the latter, Murphy reflects the frailty of human stubbornness (or is that willpower?) by repeatedly declaring early on, “Never change,” and later, “I can change,” which details bliss transforming into desperation. Murphy’s falsetto on that track is reminiscent of Antony Hegarty’s work with Hercules and Love Affair, but even if nothing “happening” here is as intoxicating as “Blind” (or “All My Friends,” for that matter), it’s so substantive in its pulse out of the puppet’s body to the master’s heart, that it’s nearly impossible not to cherish it without reservation anyhow.
Anyone allergic to the “hipper than thou” vibe probably tries his or her damnedest to resist LCD Soundsystem. This is an act, after all, that name checked roughly sixty-five groups/artists in one song, most of them not exactly marquee names outside of indie record store patrons. So it must be surprising to them (and you, wherever you might lean) that the ones primed around cyclical beats, big bass rhythms and dance hooks are the juiciest while the ventures away from that frame of mind are the weakest. Beyond “Drunk Girls,” “Somebody’s Calling Me” is too hobble-footed in both its beat continuance and velocity to not drag the pace and fervor to a near-halt late in the game. And the surprisingly dense and busy “All I Want” sounds like a revision of Bowie’s “Heroes” but with no breathing room for the scrabbly beat, and a vocal performance that can neither match the self-satisfied cleverness or faux-exasperation that the Thin White Duke had mastered by the Berlin Trilogy. Instead, look at “Pow Pow”; it’s indicative of dance music’s appeal that, despite references to Fact Magazine, Bruce Villanch, Michael Musto and “a black president”—as well as a delicious David Byrne-esque deadpan (the liquid twinkles early on even have you thinking “Once in a Lifetime”)—the vocal you remember best is, uh, “Pow, pow, pow, pow…” It seems clear to me that getting the beat right is more important than sorting out any discoveries underneath. By that judgment, Happening can’t reach Silver’s gold standard (which, despite my high estimation, is still a record I probably undervalue), but it’s obviously among the best, to quote Murphy, “dumb body music” around.
"This Is Happening" is on sale May 18, 2010 from DFA.
