LCD Soundsystem- This Is Happening

During the first three minutes of This Is Happening, you will wonder if this is going to be a very different album than Sound Of Silver. Over a minimalist-even-by-Liquid-Liquid's-standards set of percussion and the sloth-like repetition of a piano chord, James Murphy complains about people walking up to him at parties, “present company excepted.” The production is dry and muted, sounding as if someone stuffed cotton into your ears. But then the song comes to life: the beats get harder and funkier, the piano blooms into an insistent synth loop, and Murphy puts some oomph into the lyrics, dropping lines like “just go and throw your little hands out.” Ah, so this is the follow up to Sound Of Silver! The song grooves along until, at, 5:55, it recedes back to the stripped down sound before a sneaky return to the full blooded stuff at 6:35. “Break me into bigger pieces”, Murphy insists in a style/voice reminiscent of David Byrne or perhaps Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer.' For a final time, the song goes to the minimalist style at 8:12 and fades to an undistinguished ending.

This Is Happening's spirit is contained in that first track. To wit: interesting new ideas surrounded by long stretches of been-there, done-that, but-still-enjoyable grooves. and as a whole this album plays like a looser, sloppier, and jammier version of Sound Of Silver. Where that album had an emotional resonance and tight run time, with few extraneous sections that felt like dance breaks, This Is Happening is equal parts promising new directions and warmed over, extended takes on Silver sounds with emphasis on building and riding grooves to the horizon. 'One Touch' is a dance punk throwdown that recalls !!! at their funkiest, while 'Pow Pow' sails on a Talking Heads white boy afro-funk sea, during which Murphy speak-sings about New York City ennui, celebrity, art, etc. 'All I Want' nips the guitar sound whole cloth from the title track of Brian Eno's Here Come The Warm Jets while Murphy declares “all I want is your pity” over and over, eventually begging “take me home” in an exhausted croon that is like an echo of the “take me out tonight” plea from 'There Is A Light That Never Goes Out' by the Smiths.

The dichotomy between Murphy's persona as a trendsetter hipster out at high falutin' parties and art happenings versus the introspective romantic who just wants to be alone, or anyway, alone with a chick, is the point around which this album, lyrically and musically, rotates. Since he has mentioned in the press that this may be his last album as LCD Soundsystem, this might help explain why This Is Happening feels conflicted and at odds with itself. Ultimately this means that as a danceable, fun party album, This Is Happening is an unqualified success. As a 'listen at home and dig the lyrics and tunes' album, it is less so.

Once you've made peace with the fact that this album is closer in sonics than intent or results to Sound Of Silver, it's easier to pick at what exactly does and doesn't work about it. Sure, I like the danceable songs as much as anyone, but it's the unexpected moments of new musical territory and emotional clarity that make this album one of the year's most uneven and flawed but still rewarding and enjoyable releases. The aforementioned minimalist sections of the opener, 'Dance Yrself Clean,' are exciting and interesting precisely because they're unexpected. Sound Of Silver was such a brilliant album because it ably combined and fused these more (for lack of a better term) experimental and rock-y elements with funky/groovy/danceable stuff. This Is Happening, meanwhile, seems content to keep the two apart, whether it's in separate songs or sections of songs. This means if you're listening to it as a segment of the background music at a party or for straight up dancing, you'll skip over a couple songs; if you're listening to it with your full attention like any good studious music fan will, you'll have to wait for mouthfuls of arty meat between the groovy fun sugary stuff. The closest this album comes to a happy medium is the strident 'Drunk Girls', which feels out of place and is a throwaway of a post-punk pseudo-anthem, and 'Somebody's Calling Me', which is an annoying crawl through shrill synthesizer stabs and awful vocals set to plodding bass and drums. As with Animal Collective's grating wah-wah vocal piece, 'Whaddit I Done', I kind of hate it, but I also kind of love it.

Since two of this album's chiefest flaws are also its long song lengths and overall run time, if 'Drunk Girls' and 'Somebody's Calling Me' had been left on the cutting room floor, This Is Happening would be a more appealing and enjoyable listen. Yet its uneven split between new directions and warmed over echoes of past grooves is still, well, uneven, and not half as good as Sound Of Silver. But in all fairness, if it's taken on its own merits, This Is Happening is a solid album that isn't as cohesive as I'd like, and works far better as a 'dancey party-time' album than 'a headphones and eyes closed on the couch' listen. We know for sure he can do the former. The question, at least to me, is whether he can fully do the latter, as LCD Soundsystem or otherwise.

4 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

The Rapture- Echoes

I want to begin this review by admitting that when this album first came out, I thought it was absolutely amazing. Dance-punk wasn't a terribly familiar kind of music to most of my generation. At least it wasn't to me; bands like Gang Of Four, Liquid Liquid, and ESG still aren't very popular, that is to say, they aren't some of the more obvious ones that older music fans will point you to when you're starting out. So Echoes came as a revelation, and I'll never forget listening to it in the winter of '03, 'Open Up Your Heart' starting just as snow began to fall when a friend and I were on the way home from going out to eat. It was magic, and the rest of the album was a frenetic throwdown that combined the kinds of music he and I were heavily into: arty punk/post-punk, experimental and otherwise electronic music, and funky dance music.

But with that history in mind, Echoes is an album that I've recently revisited and it doesn't hold up. Perhaps it was the blush of youth, where every new album I heard was exciting and interesting. Perhaps my tastes have changed a bit. Maybe I'm a little bit more keen on spotting something that I think will endure instead of being a momentary, 'capturing a time period well' thing. Or perhaps this album isn't as good as I thought, not a 'classic' though still pretty good.

You know, I'm going to go with that last 'perhaps.'

The Rapture were at the forefront of the dance-punk explosion that took place roughly around 2003, which was sort of concurrent with the freak-folk explosion and slightly after the new garage rock revival thing had begun to die down. As alluded to above, their music combines the energy and raw power of punk, the production techniques and techno beats/bleeps of electronic music, and the booty shaking power of funk. Single 'House Of Jealous Lovers' seemed to speak to everyone, giving us music we didn't really know we wanted. There's no denying the greatness of this song--it'll easily go down as one of the defining tracks for this decade, at least as far as the 'underground' is concerned--but barring a few other gems, the thing I've come to realize is that Echoes is a fun album anchored by a fantastic song and a few great ideas spread out thinly over 11 tracks. Nowadays, Echoes sounds very homogenic, and I usually lose interest by 'Killing.'

This kind of situation, in which one retrospectively realizes an album isn't nearly as good as one thought, happens. It happens a few times to each of us, I think. A band will release a single or two and then eventually have those on their first album and the music press and all the scenesters go crazy for it, praising it to high heaven. I mean seriously, Pitchfork gave this album their 'best of' status for 2003. 2003 wasn't an incredible year for music but still, there were better albums than this. But I digress. In the end, you come to know that whatever was praised so highly, what captured your heart so strongly, doesn't hold up. Echoes is an OK album; it's a fun listen and really good to drive or dance to, but it's not going to go down in history. Other than 'Open Up Your Heart' and 'Infatuation', the album is little more than 9 variations on the sound 'House Of Jealous Lovers' established. It's an excellent song, sure, but I don't need that many things like it. Maybe this is a good thing if, again, you want a peppy, energetic album to groove to, but it doesn't make for a timeless music.

The Rapture face the same problem that many bands do who release a single or album that defines a sub-genre of music: where to go from there?? Too often the new sub-genre attracts a hundred new bands who all sound nearly identical, the 'sound' becoming a homogenized and dogmatic one in the process. Dance-punk is a great starting point, but you've got go somewhere from there. Unfortunately, The Rapture chose to wait 3 years before releasing their next album, by which point no one really cared about them anymore. Moreover, they had trimmed away some of the interesting experimental/punk aspects of their music, effectively making them a white boy indie rock dance band. The only band of the 2003 dance-punk era who seemed to have escaped is Liars, who were always far more 'out there' than the other bands and quickly proved it with their second and third albums. I suppose LCD Soundsystem escaped too by virtue of the fact that they were always much closer to the dance side of the dance-punk equation. Also, with songs as good as those on Sound Of Silver, it wouldn't matter what 'style' you were. Hey...now that was a classic album, one that'll stand the test of time (probably). Just as most of the hardcore punk bands are a historical curiosity because they didn't go anywhere from super fast, super aggresive punk rock, dance-punk bands will probably go down as a historical curiosity because most of them didn't go anywhere from their starting points, either. As a 'scene' they're important and good, but as individual bands they're forgettable. I'm sure The Rapture's follow-up to Echoes, Pieces of the People We Love, is decent, but I really don't care.

It may seem as if I'm being a bit hard on Echoes, but I like to think of this as more 'correcting the curve.' For what it is and what it's trying to be, it makes for good, fun, danceable music with a handful of fantastic ideas and sounds. Unfortunately, these fantastic ideas and sounds are stretched to fill 11 songs, and anytime I can tell someone they only really need to hear one song ('House Of Jealous Lovers') off a record, I'm a bit reluctant to get too crazy about it. Anyway, Echoes is good but it's not 5 stars, 10 out of 10 good. In the end I just feel...ambivalent about it.